Trump critic Matt Taibbi facing backlash over Russia memoir

Little Weasel

Matt Taibbi, a writer for Rolling Stone magazine, is facing backlash over a 2000 memoir he co-authored.  (Penguin Random House)

Rolling Stone magazine journalist Matt Taibbi won a lot of praise from the anti-Trump crowd earlier this year, when he released a book titled “Insane Clown President.”

But now many of those admirers may be wondering who the real clown is.

After receiving backlash over a 2000 memoir that details his past behavior toward women, Taibbi now says the book was a fictional “satire.”
Taibbi abruptly canceled his scheduled appearance at a humanities festival in Chicago on Saturday after negative reaction to an interview he recently gave to an NPR reporter.
According to Reuters, NPR asked Taibbi about the memoir he co-authored, called “The Exile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia.”
The book details the exploits of Taibbi, 47, and another staffer while they worked for an English-language newspaper in Russia.
The memoir includes anecdotes in which Taibbi and co-author Mark Ames seem to have mistreated – possibly even assaulted – some women they encountered in Russia, Reuters reported.
According to an excerpt published by the Chicago Reader, Taibbi and Ames refer to attractive Russian women as being “usually available to the highest bidder,” and often willing to engage in “condomless sex.”
But in a Facebook post last week, Taibbi wrote that the memoir was really fictional and that his intent was to poke fun at the idea of Americans living in Russia.
“I regret many editorial decisions that I made back then, and putting my name as a co-author on a book that used cruel and misogynistic language to describe many people and women in particular,” Taibbi wrote. “I hope readers can forgive my poor judgment at that time.”
Co-author Ames also posted that the book was fictional.
“I never raped, harassed, assaulted anyone, and it sickens me that I’m dragged into having to make this sort of denial,” Ames wrote, according to Reuters.
The Chicago Reader’s Aimee Levitt, however, notes that Twitter users have pointed out that the book contains a note at the beginning, saying it was nonfictional.
“To fail to acknowledge Taibbi's earlier work is to say that what he and Ames wrote about doing didn't matter, how those women felt didn't matter, and, by extension, to say we don't matter, and you, our female readers, don't matter,” Levitt writes. “But we do. And you do.”

NFL players seek meeting with Goodell, McNair, Kaepernick

The NFL  Should Move Permanently To London.

The NFL Players Coalition is seeking a meeting with, from left, Commissioner Roger Goodell, Houston Texans owner Bob McNair and free agent quarterback Colin Kaepernick.

An NFL team owner’s recent “inmates running the prison” remark has prompted a group of the league’s players to call for a meeting Monday to clear the air.

The Washington Post reported Saturday that a panel called the Players Coalition has requested a meeting Monday in Philadelphia with league Commissioner Roger Goodell, Houston Texans owner Bob McNair, and free agent quarterback Colin Kaepernick.

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It wasn’t immediately clear if all parties had agreed to attend.
Meanwhile, ESPN reported Saturday that the Houston Texans players were planning to stage an unspecified protest against McNair's remarks prior to Sunday's game against the Seahawks in Seattle.
“Many players have been deeply troubled by the disturbing comments made by Texans' owner Bob McNair,” the Players Coalition said in a statement. “It is ironic that such a quote would emerge in the midst of an ongoing struggle to highlight injustices suffered by people of color, including our nation's deeply flawed approach to criminal justice and inhumane treatment of imprisoned people.”
McNair has apologized twice since making what he described as a “very regretful comment” during a recent league meeting about players’ national anthem protests. The comment was published in ESPN The Magazine.
But McNair insisted afterward that he wasn’t referring to the players as “inmates” when he said, “We can’t have the inmates running the prison.” Instead, he said, he was describing the relationship between team owners and the league office in New York.
Nevertheless, in a league on edge over race-related matters -- sparked in large part by Kaepernick’s 2016 protests against American society’s treatment of people of color – the “inmates” remark wasn’t accepted well.
Last season Kaepernick, who was with the San Francisco 49ers, began kneeling during the national anthem before games, saying he was protesting police killings of African-Americans. But many critics argued that protesting during the anthem was disrespectful to the nation and especially the members of the U.S. military.
After President Donald Trump made a veiled reference to Kaepernick as a “son of a bitch” during a September speech in Alabama, more players joined the protest – even though Kaepernick was out of the league by then.
In their statement, the players asserted that McNair’s remark suggested that some league officials were not taking their concerns seriously.
“As long as the prevailing reality of our league includes a culture where owners feel such behavior and language is permissible, our cause will continue to be stifled and progress will remain elusive,” the statement said. “This isn't about being a player or a club owner - but basic human decency.”
According to ESPN, the Players Coalition is led by Philadelphia Eagles safety Malcolm Jenkins, retired wide receiver Anquan Boldin and other players who are engaged in community activism.

Speculation swirls amid reports Mueller has filed charges in Russia-Trump associates probe

Speculation swirled Sunday awaiting the announcement of possible charges in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between Russia and members of the Trump presidential campaign, as his tactics have been called into question.

The charges being filed by a grand jury was reported first by CNN and the Wall Street Journal, which said anyone charged will be taken into custody Monday. However, the charges have been sealed by a federal judge. So whoever is charged and whether the charges are criminal remains unclear.

The possible charges come as Mueller's tactics have been called into question.
During a raid by the FBI in July of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort's Virginia home,  a source close to the investigation told Fox News at the time the scope of the search was "heavy-handed, designed to intimidate."
Andrew Weissmann, the prosecutor tapped by Mueller to help lead the investigation, has also received criticism. Sidney Powell, a former federal prosecutor recently wrote about Weissman in a piece titled, “Judging by Mueller's staffing choices, he may not be very interested in justice.”
Powell accused Weissmann, once the director of the Enron Task Force, of “prosecutorial overreach” in past cases and said it could signal what’s to come for President Trump and his associates in the Russia probe.
“What was supposed to have been a search for Russia’s cyberspace intrusions into our electoral politics has morphed into a malevolent mission targeting friends, family and colleagues of the president,” Powell wrote in The Hill. “The Mueller investigation has become an all-out assault to find crimes to pin on them — and it won’t matter if there are no crimes to be found. This team can make some.”
Powell cited several cases where Weissmann won convictions that were later overturned.
During a Saturday appearance on Fox News, former Department of Justice official Robert Driscoll told anchor Leland Vittert it’s possible the indictment might not even be directly tied to Russian collusion.
“Think back to the Clinton years,” Driscoll said. “The Whitewater investigation was about an Arkansas land deal. And it ended up being about something else completely.”
Driscoll added, “Robert Mueller is free to look at taxes, is free to look at lobbying filings, foreign agent filings. Things like that could all be involved that wouldn’t necessarily touch on the issue of Russia collusion that everyone seems focused on politically.”
Speculation has focused on former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn as likely targets.
Manafort has been the subject of a longstanding investigation into his dealings in the Ukraine several years ago -- for which he did not file as a foreign agent until June 2017.
Federal agents, reportedly in search of evidence related to the Russia investigation, this summer raided his northern Virginia home. He also was reportedly wiretapped by investigators before and after the 2016 presidential election.
Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general, was a Trump surrogate during the campaign and briefly served as national security adviser before being fired for failing to fully disclose his conversations with Sergey Kislyak, then-Russian ambassador to the United States.
The FBI also secured approval from a federal court to monitor the communications of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
On Saturday, Page released a statement to Fox News in response to questions about whether he or his lawyers have been notified about any charges.
Page said in the statement that he has worked with the executive branch and Congress since being contacted in March. But he also suggested that revelations about the Democratic Party having helped finance a dossier to smear Trump has tainted any Russia probe. 
“In terms of ‘charges', I can’t even imagine what might even be considered now that the false evidence from the politically-motivated, big-money-financed Dodgy Dossier that started this extrajudicial disaster has instead been so thoroughly exposed as a complete sham,” Carter wrote in the statement.
The Wall Street Journal reported at least one person could be taken into custody as early as Monday.
Richard Hibey, an attorney for Manafort, told Fox News on Friday that neither he nor any of his colleagues representing Manafort had been informed of any indictment of their client.
Manafort has been the subject of a longstanding investigation into his dealings in the Ukraine several years ago – for which he did not file as a foreign agent until June 2017. In addition to his home being raided, Manafort was reportedly wiretapped by investigators before and after the 2016 presidential election.
A retired Army lieutenant general, Flynn served as a Trump surrogate during the campaign and briefly served as national security adviser before being fired over his conversations with Sergey Kislyak, who was Russia's ambassador to the United States.
Mueller has reportedly probed whether Flynn was involved in a private effort to get former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton's emails from Russian hackers.
NBC reported Saturday that Mueller will make public an indictment on Monday.
The Justice Department’s special counsel’s office declined to comment on the reports of filed charges. There was no immediate comment from the White House.
Trump has denied allegations that his campaign colluded with Russians and condemned investigations into the matter as “a witch hunt”.

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President Trump Blasts Tom Steyer After Impeachment Ad Campaign

Tom Steyer

October 27, 2017

OAN Newsroom

President Trump is blasting hedge fund manager Tom Steyer, after he launched a national campaign calling for the President’s Impeachment.
In a tweet early Friday morning, the President called Steyer unhinged, adding the billionaire has been fighting his administration’s agenda from the beginning.
Steyer’s advertisement began running on multiple media outlets last week, urging viewers to call their members of congress to bring articles of impeachment.

Conservative website The Free Beacon funded initial Fusion GPS Trump opposition effort

Paul Singer 

The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website funded by a major Republican donor, was the first to hire the firm that conducted opposition research on Donald J. Trump — including a salacious dossier describing ties between Mr. Trump and the Russian government — website representatives told the House Intelligence Committee on Friday.

According to people briefed on the conversation, the website hired the firm, Fusion GPS, in October 2015 to unearth damaging information about several Republican presidential candidates, including Mr. Trump. But The Free Beacon told the firm to stop doing research on Mr. Trump in May 2016, as Mr. Trump was clinching the Republican nomination.

In April 2016, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee also retained Fusion GPS to research any possible connections between Mr. Trump, his businesses, his campaign team and Russia. Working for them, Fusion GPS retained a respected former British spy named Christopher Steele.He went on to produce a series of memos that alleged a broad conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to influence the 2016 election on behalf of Mr. Trump. The memos, which became known as the “Steele dossier,” also contained unsubstantiated accounts of encounters between Mr. Trump and Russian prostitutes, as well as real estate deals that were intended as bribes.

The Free Beacon is funded in large part by the New York hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, according to an associate of Mr. Singer. The associate said Mr. Singer, a leading Republican donor, was not aware of the dossier or Mr. Steele’s involvement until January, when BuzzFeed published the dossier.

The Free Beacon has a history of employing so-called opposition research firms to assist in news articles critical of targets ranging from Mr. Trump to Mrs. Clinton.

The opposition research project that ultimately produced the controversial Trump-Russia dossier was initially backed by the conservative Washington Free Beacon website, it was revealed late Friday.

Free Beacon editor-in-chief Matthew Continetti and chairman Michael Goldfarb said in a statement that the publication had retained Fusion GPS to "provide research on multiple candidates in the [2016] Republican presidential primary," as well as Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton.

Continetti and Goldfarb denied that the Free Beacon "had contact with, knowledge of, or provided payment for any work performed by Christopher Steele," the former British spy who compiled the now-infamous file. The dossier, which was published by BuzzFeed in January, contained unverified and lurid allegations about dirt the Russians had on then-candidate Donald Trump and his campaign’s possible connections to Moscow.
Free Beacon's connection with Fusion GPS was first reported by the Washington Examiner. According to the Examiner's report, lawyers for the Free Beacon told the House Intelligence Committee that the website funded the research between the fall of 2015 and the spring of 2016.
At some point after that, Fusion GPS was retained by Mark Elias, an attorney representing the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign. Fusion GPS hired Steele after the Free Beacon left the project.
Committee spokesman Jack Langer told Fox News that the Free Beacon "has issued a statement asserting that it had no involvement with Christopher Steele or the dossier he compiled from Russian sources. The Beacon has agreed to cooperate with the House Intelligence Committee to help the Committee verify this assertion."
Earlier this week, the Washington Post reported that the Clinton campaign and the DNC paid more than $9 million to Elias’ firm, Perkins Coie, which, in turn, retained the political consultants who commissioned the research.
But it’s unclear how much of that $9 million went toward the dossier. And it’s unclear who exactly at the Clinton campaign and DNC might have known how it was being spent.
In their statement, Continetti and Goldfarb denied having any knowledge "of the relationship between Fusion GPS and the Democratic National Committee, Perkins Coie, and the Clinton campaign."
"We stand by our reporting, and we do not apologize for our methods," they added. "We consider it our duty to report verifiable information, not falsehoods or slander, and we believe that commitment has been well demonstrated by the quality of the journalism that we produce."
The Washington Free Beacon was initially founded as a project of the conservative nonprofit group Center for American Freedom, as an alternative to liberal news sites run by progressive nonprofits.
The Center for American Freedom was organized as a 501(c)4 and did not reveal its donors, but a person close to Goldfarb said Singer was an early backer of the project. Later, the Free Beacon was spun-off into a for-profit website.

Goldfarb was deputy communications director on John McCain's presidential campaign.

Singer has been a major player in Republican politics in recent years and maintains ties to Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and several powerful Republicans, including House Speaker Paul Ryan.
A representative to Singer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Singer was backing Rubio's presidential bid at the time of the Free Beacon's involvement. Rubio's team insisted this week that they had no knowledge of the dossier. Singer's close associate Dan Senor also served as Speaker Ryan's chief adviser during the 2012 president campaign.

Mattis: US will not accept a nuclear North Korea

U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis issued a stern warning to North Korea on Saturday: Despite its ongoing missile and nuclear programs, it is simply no match for the U.S.-South Korea alliance.

“Make no mistake,” Mattis said during a news conference in Seoul, “any attack on the United States or our allies will be defeated, and any use of nuclear weapons by the North will be met with a massive military response that is effective and overwhelming.”

During the joint appearance with South Korean Defense Minister Song Young-moo, Mattis acknowledged that the threat of a nuclear missile attack by North Korea was accelerating.
The CIA says North Korea could be just months away from being capable of hitting the U.S. with a nuclear strike, Reuters reported.
Mattis accused the regime of Kim Jong Un of illegal and unnecessary missile and nuclear programs -- and vowed to defeat any attack.
He said the North engages in "outlaw" behavior and that the U.S. would never accept a nuclear North. He added that regardless of what the North might try, it is overmatched by the firepower and cohesiveness of the decades-old U.S.-South Korean alliance.
“North Korea has accelerated the threat that it poses to its neighbors and the world through its illegal and unnecessary missile and nuclear weapons programs," Mattis said, adding that U.S.-South Korean military and diplomatic collaboration thus has taken on "a new urgency."
“I cannot imagine a condition under which the United States would accept North Korea as a nuclear power," he said.

"I cannot imagine a condition under which the United States would accept North Korea as a nuclear power."

- U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis

As he emphasized throughout his weeklong Asia trip – which comes ahead of President Donald Trump’s own scheduled tour of East Asia next week -- Mattis said diplomacy remains the preferred way to deal with the North.
Mattis's comments in Seoul did not go beyond his recent statements of concern about North Korea, although he appeared to inject a stronger note about the urgency of resolving the crisis.
While he accused the North of "outlaw" behavior, he did not mention that President Donald Trump has ratcheted up his own rhetoric. In August, Trump warned the North not to make any more threats against the United States, and said that if it did, it would be met with "fire and fury like the world has never seen."
Limits would be lifted
Song, the South Korean minister, told the news conference that he and Mattis agreed that limits on South Korea conventional missile warhead payloads would be lifted. He offered no specifics.
Also discussed were the conditions under which South Korea would be given wartime operational control of its forces. Currently, if war with the North broke out, the South's forces would operate under the U.S.-led U.N. Command.
Trump entered office declaring his commitment to solving the North Korea problem, asserting that he would succeed where his predecessors had failed. His administration has sought to increase pressure on Pyongyang through U.N. Security Council sanctions and other diplomatic efforts, but the North hasn't budged from its goal of building a full-fledged nuclear arsenal, including missiles capable of striking the U.S. mainland.
If Trump sticks to his pledge to stop the North from being able to threaten the U.S. with a nuclear attack, something will have to give - either a negotiated tempering of the North's ambitions or a U.S. acceptance of the North as a nuclear power.
The other alternative would be U.S. military action to attempt to neutralize or eliminate the North's nuclear assets - a move fraught with risk for South Korea, Japan and the United States.
At his Seoul news conference, Mattis said the North is, in effect, shooting itself in the foot.
“If it remains on its current path of ballistic missiles and atomic bombs, it will be counterproductive, in effect reducing its security," he said.

The North says it needs nuclear weapons to counter what it believes is a U.S. effort to strangle its economy and overthrow the Kim government.
Second visit to region
This was Mattis's second visit to South Korea since taking office in January. He made a point of going to Seoul and Tokyo on his first overseas trip in February, saying he wanted to emphasis the importance he places on strengthening alliances and partnerships.
On Friday he visited the Demilitarized Zone that forms an official buffer between the two Koreas. He appeared there with Song in what they both called a show of solidarity.
U.S. government officials for decades have confidently but mistakenly predicted the approaching collapse of North Korea, given its economic and political isolation.
Twenty years ago, Mattis's predecessor five times removed, William Cohen, said as he peered into North Korea from inside the DMZ that its communist system was "decaying and dying." His view was widely shared in Washington, but, like others, he underestimated the resilience of Pyongyang's family dynasty, which began with Kim Il Sung.
The current ruler assumed control of the country shortly after his father, Kim Jong-Il, died in December 2011, and has accelerated the country's nuclear and missile programs.

Mueller Russia probe reportedly nets first charges

Charges have reportedly been filed in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.  (Associated Press)

The first charges have been filed in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, reports said Friday evening.

At least one person could be taken into custody as early as Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing unnamed sources.

It wasn't immediately clear who could be charged or for what.
Richard Hibey, attorney for former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, told Fox News that neither he nor any of his colleagues representing Manafort had been informed of any indictment of their client.
Manafort has been the subject of a longstanding investigation due to his dealings in Ukraine several years ago – for which he didn’t file as a foreign agent until June 2017. Manafort had his house raided by FBI agents earlier this summer and was reportedly wiretapped by investigators – before and after the election.
Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn is another possible target of the probe.
A retired Army lieutenant general, Flynn served as a Trump surrogate during the campaign and briefly served as national security adviser before being fired over his conversations with Sergey Kislyak, who was Russia's ambassador to the United States.
Mueller has reportedly probed whether Flynn was involved in a private effort to get former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton's emails from Russian hackers.
MUELLER'S RUSSIA INVESTIGATION: WHAT TO KNOW
The special counsel's office declined to comment on the reports of filed charges. There was no immediate comment from the White House.