What Happened Today: July 27, 2022
What Happened Today: July 27, 2022
Garland reiterates job description; Joni Mitchell’s Newport grace; Democrats bid for desired midterm opponents
The Big Story
Speaking to NBC News on Tuesday night, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that, even if Donald Trump were to make another bid for the White House in 2024, the Department of Justice could potentially bring charges against the former president for crimes related to the Jan. 6 riots and breach of the Capitol. “We intend to hold everyone, anyone who was criminally responsible for the events surrounding January 6, for any attempt to interfere with the lawful transfer of power from one administration to another, accountable,” said Garland. Though framed by NBC as a provocative foreshadowing of charges to come, the attorney general’s prime-time comments also amount to a basic explanation of his core duties (prosecute crimes) and follow eight days’ worth of highly polished hearings by a House committee investigation that have followed a similar pattern.
With production help from James Goldston, a former president of ABC News, the House committee public hearings were introduced by committee members as a definitive indictment of Trump’s criminal misdeeds, with Rep. Adam Schiff assuring “credible evidence” forthcoming. Schiff had played a leading role in promoting allegations of collusion between Trump and the Russian government that were later discredited and based on evidence that never materialized. Though the Jan. 6 hearings earned high ratings and might have swayed some voters, by the end the committee had backed off its initial claims of criminal liability and condemned Trump for a job poorly done. “I look at it as a dereliction of duty. He didn’t act. He did not take action to stop the violence,” said member Rep. Elaine Luria. Indeed, Trump’s failure to act became a recurring theme for the probe, which found that many of the most serious charges concerning his actions around the 2020 election focused on things he discussed but never did: Justice Department officials he didn’t fire, a draft tweet he never sent, an executive order he didn’t sign. As law professor Jonathan Turley recently pointed out, the committee surfaced a damning record of failed leadership and unbecoming conduct—“the type of evidence used to show mens rea—‘guilty mind,’” he wrote. “However, crimes generally require both guilty minds and guilty acts.”
In the Back Pages: The National Tragedy of Hunter Biden’s Laptop
The Rest
→ Number of the Day: $420,000
The amount the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DNCC) has spent supporting a right-wing MAGA-aligned House Republican candidate over his more moderate, anti-Trump opponent in a key midterm race in Michigan. Although candidate John Gibbs is closely aligned with former President Trump and incumbent Peter Meijer previously joined ten other Republicans in a vote to impeach Trump following the January 6 Capitol riot, the DNCC has backed Gibbs because it sees him as an easier opponent to defeat for Democrats in the general election. It’s one of several such high-stakes gambles the DNCC has made to engineer more favorable midterm races, pouring in millions of dollars to push a slate of far-right candidates in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Colorado, and other battleground contests where Democrats believe they have an upper hand. The strategy hasn’t been foolproof, failing to secure the desired opponents in two California races. It also comes with significant risk. Hillary Clinton’s campaign made its own attempts to raise Donald Trump above other Republicans during the primary, on the assumption he’d be the weaker foe in the general election.
→ This year’s midterm elections will mark the first time that candidates will dedicate much of their media budgets to running commercials on streaming internet platforms instead of cable television.
According to new projections from AdImpact, an advertising tracking company, ad spending for commercials streamed to platforms like Hulu will total $1.5 billion, compared to minuscule amounts in previous election cycles.
A key cause of this, aside from the ever-growing popularity of streaming platforms, is that the laws about how cookies can be collected online are changing, deeply impacting political marketing.
Cookies enable websites to track what you do while you’re browsing the web. First-party cookies come from the website itself (e.g., a weather site storing data about your location), while third-party cookies are advertisers looking at what you’re looking at (e.g., you’re seeing rain forecast in your area, here’s an ad for umbrellas).
Regulators in Europe are cracking down on these practices—this is why you’ve been getting so many warnings that “this site uses cookies” when you search the web.
Streaming platforms, meanwhile, don’t share data with other websites the way your weather site shares data with the umbrella vendor, making streamers traditionally less appealing areas for advertisers than the cookie-covered open web.
That is, until now. With cookies no longer a reliable way of reaching voters, marketing companies are turning to platforms in the hopes that they will reach voters where they are: streaming television.
→ Video of the Day:
Closing out the Newport Folk Festival on Sunday night, Joni Mitchell made a surprise appearance and performed her first full set in public since 2000—and since suffering a near-fatal brain aneurysm in 2015. This was also the first time Mitchell performed at the Newport Folk Festival since 1967, when she exploded onto the scene as an icon of the era. As the musicians onstage with Mitchell made clear, she emerged as one of the most singular voices of the folk era. Mitchell was joined, for this rendition of her 1967 classic “Both Sides Now,” by several generations of musicians deeply indebted to her music, including Brandi Carlile, who arranged the performance, along with Allison Russell, Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig of Lucius, Blake Mills, Taylor Goldsmith, Marcus Mumford, and Wynona Judd.
Read More: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/26/arts/music/joni-mitchell-performance.html
→ An almost weeklong trucker protest that shut down the Port of Oakland has now been consigned to “free speech zones,” returning one of the West Coast’s largest container ports to its understaffed and backlogged business as usual. The truckers were protesting a 2020 law, AB5, that was passed to help gig workers get more job security and benefits but that had the unintended consequence of forcing truckers, many of whom own and operate their own trucks, to spend tens of thousands of dollars to remain independent. The law had been held up in the courts until the Supreme Court refused to hear the case, setting the stage for its passage. The pileup of containers at the port will now be sorted by dockworkers from the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, who had refused to cross the picket line out of solidarity with the protesting truckers.
→ Quote of the Day: “Hard to believe that Bruce Springsteen turned out to be the one to make music fans miss scalpers.”
Commenting on a musical moment far less graceful than Joni Mitchell’s return to the stage, Bill Werde, a former editorial director at Billboard who now publishes an industry newsletter, was saddened to see that Bruce Springsteen tickets are now going at $5,000 a pop at face value. Some of the fans hoping to see Springsteen have encountered a demand-driven ticket pricing system that has pushed prices to extraordinary highs. This is especially disappointing as Springsteen has a history of sticking it to the Ticket-Industrial-Complex. In 2009, Springsteen called out Ticketmaster for its pricing policies—“The abuse of our fans and our trust by Ticketmaster has made us as furious as it has made many of you,” the Boss said then—leading to a heartfelt apology from the company’s CEO. Now, however, Springsteen seems to be singing a different tune.
→ In the gig economy, some people drive Ubers, others cater parties on weekends, and others write werewolf erotica. The booming “web novel” industry pays people all across the world to pen pulpy page turners, “assembling a global supply chain of authors in lower-income countries and paying them to churn out thousands of words a day for English-speaking readers in the West.” Some of these web novel platforms, which sell work packed with cliff-hangers and steamy sex scenes—often set in the American West—are owned by prominent Chinese media companies, including Tencent, which is one of the highest-grossing media companies in the world, and ByteDance, which owns TikTok. Amazon, too, has gotten into the action with its launch of Kindle Vella last year. Web novel writers can make anywhere from $300-$800 per book, while the publishers can pull in 10 times as much.
Read More: https://restofworld.org/2022/china-romance-novels/
→ Tweet of the Day: A thread from the anonymous Twitter user called “Coddled affluent professional” considers the detritus littering our media hellscape. Speaking specifically about the once-powerful Gawker, which recently published and then quickly retracted an article making false allegations against the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, the thread considers what we should do with the downwardly mobile creative class. “We’ve spent 10 years ignoring the radioactive cultural waste left by collapsing industries as the externalities have continued to mount. What’s the plan for containment? For controlled demolition?”
→ The German government has signaled that it will offer further compensation to the relatives of the 11 Olympic athletes killed by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Olympic games in Munich; its initial offer was seen by the surviving family members as “insulting.” The back-and-forth comes as Germany prepares for a fall event to mark the 50th anniversary of the tragedy—an event that the relatives of the 11 murdered athletes will not attend unless they receive a more just offer. “[Germany] threw us to the dogs,” said Ilana Romano, the widow of the Olympic weight lifter Yossef Romano. “They mistreated us for 50 years.”
Read More: https://apnews.com/article/winter-olympics-sports-israel-germany-9f8c0c968eabee6f3017e9058127f3af
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
TODAY IN TABLET:
An American Antidote to Rage: Tablet contributing writer David Mikics on why the most urgent writers of today are Ralph Ellison, Joan Didion, Thomas Pynchon, and Elizabeth Bishop.
Read More: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/american-antidote-rage
Am I a Jewish Writer Now?: Kristopher Jansma is a writer who recently converted to Judaism. But there may be more to it than that.
Read More: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/am-i-a-jewish-writer-now-jansma
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something you want to tell us about that’s going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
Today’s Back Pages is an excerpt from an article by Lee Smith, “The National Tragedy of Hunter Biden’s Laptop: How a country’s political corruption, institutional decay, and moral decline can be summed up in one sad family saga.” Smith’s full article appears in Wednesday’s edition of Tablet.
The recent release of more gigabytes of images and information from Hunter Biden’s laptop adds to the evidence that the all-out elite effort to bury the scandal before the 2020 election wasn’t just to protect Joe Biden, the preferred candidate of the American oligarchy. Sure, the 50-plus senior U.S. intelligence professionals who signed a letter claiming the laptop’s contents were “Russian disinformation” wanted to stop Donald Trump from sending angry tweets at them, but the laptop suggests there was much more at stake.
The U.S. spy chiefs who signed that infamously misleading letter—including John Brennan, Leon Panetta, Michael Hayden, and James Clapper—had directed America’s foreign intelligence services while Biden was vice president and before that chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. They knew what his son Hunter was doing abroad, because it was their job to know what foreign services know about leading U.S. officials and their families, and how it might affect U.S. national security.
But none of these powerful and experienced men, presumably dedicated to defending the national interest, lifted a finger to stop Hunter Biden—and really, how could they? He was Joe Biden’s son, after all. And by doing nothing about him, the pillars of America’s intelligence community became the curators of the Biden family’s scandal.
When Trump started asking questions in 2019 about Hunter and his father, prompted by Joe Biden’s public comments about protecting Hunter’s business associates abroad, it became clear that the only way to contain the mushrooming scandal involving key U.S. interests in Ukraine and China—a scandal whose magnitude they had known about for a decade—was to provide the former vice president with all the resources the U.S. government could muster. And that helped make him president.
There is so much data on Hunter Biden’s laptop that it’s hard to keep straight the sequence of images and information that have come from it since the New York Post started sourcing stories to the personal computer in October 2020. The most recent release includes 80,000 images that a Switzerland-based cyber expert recovered from deleted iPad and iPhone accounts backed up on the laptop.
There are more pictures, texts, and emails about the younger Biden’s business deals, drug use, sex life, and family relations. Hunter referred to his stepmother, first lady Jill Biden, as a “vindictive moron.” There’s a contact nicknamed “Pedo Peter,” which appears to refer to his father: Joe Biden often used the alias “Peter Henderson,” the name of a character in a Tom Clancy novel, when he traveled.
“I saw about two dozen images of young girls in suggestive poses and then stopped looking,” says Jack Maxey, a former co-host of Steve Bannon’s “War Room” and the source of the laptop data later authenticated by The Washington Post and Daily Mail. “That’s why I keep asking for some sheriff somewhere to get involved and do this the right way,” Maxey told me in a phone call. “It has to be done under lawful conditions.”
It was Maxey who got The Washington Post to admit that the information on Hunter Biden’s laptop is genuine. In June 2021, Maxey brought the paper a copy of the hard drive from the computer that Biden left with a Delaware repairman in April 2019. The repairman has said he offered the laptop to the FBI in July of that year and heard nothing back until five months later when the bureau confiscated it from him. That was December 2019, when U.S. spy services were using congressional allies to impeach Donald Trump for asking questions about the Bidens’ activities in Ukraine, which are described on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
In September 2020, the repairman gave a copy of the hard drive to Rudolph Giuliani’s lawyer. The former New York City mayor had been investigating the Bidens’ work in Ukraine for nearly two years at that point after receiving a tip from a former federal prosecutor. Giuliani helped disseminate copies of the hard drive, one of which Maxey took to The Washington Post.
Nine months after Maxey sat with Post reporters to explain the contents of the hard drive, the paper reported its own independent authentication of 22,000 emails in March of 2022. These included communications regarding a deal with a Chinese energy company that earned Hunter $5 million, and his work with Burisma, the Ukrainian energy firm that paid him $83,333 per month to sit on its board. His father later boasted in public that he’d threatened to withhold a $1 billion loan guarantee to Ukraine unless the central government in Kyiv fired the prosecutor investigating Burisma. At roughly the same time, The Washington Post authenticated these emails, The New York Times also verified communications found on Hunter Biden’s computer.
So, have America’s two most prestigious newsprint organizations at last acknowledged that they were wrong to believe former intelligence officials who claimed the New York Post’s October 2020 reporting on the Biden laptop was Russian disinformation? Of course not. They were and remain proud of their role in helping push Trump out of Washington. According to one survey, one out of six Biden voters said that had they known about Hunter’s laptop in time, they wouldn’t have voted for his father …
Read the rest here.
The 1/6/21 hearings are a show trial and kangaroo court that has not been shown a scintilla of admissible evidence. The legacy media waits for bombshells that are not going to drop while ignoring and suppressing inquiry into financial arrangements of the Rico enterprise in the White House