As you know, I was calling on the press to focus on the suspected $10 million payment Egypt made to Trump before it was cool — since even before the WaPo significantly advanced the story over a month later.

In the aftermath of Trump’s shitshow presser last week, a slew of people have started calling on the hand–picked set of journalists who’ll attend today’s presser to focus on the Egyptian payment.

It is important that Trump face questions about it.

But, in my opinion, that’s not the most important financial windfall to question. The ongoing Saudi funding of Trump is.

There are four payments of interest:

• The $2 billion investment in Jared Kushner’s investment fund after Mohammed bin Salman overrode the recommendations of advisors who pointed out he’s unqualified and was charging too much.
• The LIV golf tournaments hosted at Trump properties; while Forbes has estimated the tournaments were a minimal part of Trump Organization revenue, they put Trump at the center of a Saudi influence-peddling racket that was too toxic for even Vivek Ramaswamy.
• The freebie branding deal for a development in Oman, for which Trump has already pocketed $5 million.
• The more recent deal — with the same government-connected construction firm as the Oman deal — for a Trump Tower in Jeddah.

There are a bunch of reasons why the Saudi payments are more important.

First, while the Egyptian payment does seem to have coincided with increased coziness on Trump’s part for Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, the Saudi/Gulf influence-peddling was orchestrated even earlier by Tom Barrack (and assisted by Paul Manafort). There’s good reason to suspect the autocrats of the world are at least chatting openly about efforts to reinstall Trump, because he will undermine democracy and human rights.

The Jared investment, especially, looks like a quid pro quo for America’s help downplaying the Jamal Khashoggi assassination. That is, that payment, at least, looks like a specific payoff, a payoff for letting Mohammed bin Salman chop up a US resident journalist with a bone saw.

As noted, Trump’s involvement in LIV really legitimized a clear Saudi influence-peddling racket.

The branding deals in Oman and Jeddah parallel the free money Moscow Trump Tower deal that was fairly clearly an attempt to purchase Trump (and put Trump back in the business of selling money laundering vehicles to corrupt people again).

The branding deals are especially troubling given the closer involvement of Eric and Don Jr in Trump’s campaign this time. Will Trump do what he did the last time, and install his children in the White House and give them access to classified records they would otherwise never be cleared to access?

And finally, there are the missing stolen documents. According to the indictment, Trump took boxes of documents with him to Bedminster after he hid them from Evan Corcoran (and he had the classified Iran document with him the previous summer in Bedminster). As ABC reported last month, Trump snuck back to Mar-a-Lago, a trip witnesses described was an effort to check on his stolen documents. Then, weeks later, the Saudis arrived for their golf tournament. By all accounts, there must be documents outstanding, and one possible explanation for their disappearance is they left the country.

Finally, and most simply, Trump has not (as far as I’ve seen) even remotely addressed what he will do with his existing Saudi deals if he is elected in November. Even if he agreed to shelter himself from the business (assuming, of course, that he doesn’t give either Don Jr or Eric a job in the White House), we would have to assume he was lying, just like he lied the last time.

We literally do not know whether Trump would enter the White House as a business partner, an employee, or an unregistered foreign agent of the Saudis.

The Saudi financial tie is ongoing and prospective. That makes it a far more urgent issue than a payment that may have been made over seven years ago.

Update: Amicus12 adds another reason to worry about the Saudi deals: Trump’s past efforts to strike a nuclear deal with the Saudis, which could be used to get nukes.

I’m the rarity among lefties who supports the decision of Politico, WaPo, and NYT (thus far) to not publish the actual files that a persona suspected to have ties to Iranian hackers sent them. That’s true, partly because I think this hack could be even more dangerous than the one of Hillary. But it’s also true because of the opportunity cost that publishing stolen documents incurs.

I prefer Kamala Harris’ message to remain the affirmative message she’s running on, and to the extent that those outlets are doing reporting like the story further developing the suspected $10 million payment via Egypt to Trump, I’d like them to continue to pursue real reporting, as well.

One of the real impacts of the files Russia hacked in 2016 is that they distracted journalists from harder work, work about what a corrupt man Trump is. Campaign reporters are already distracted too easily by nonsense stuff; they don’t need any further distractions from their day job.

That said, reporters don’t have to publish the actual documents to address something that is clearly newsworthy about the files. As Politico explained, the main thing the persona has sent so far was a draft of the vetting document for JD Vance and Marco Rubio.

A research dossier the campaign had apparently done on Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, which was dated Feb. 23, was included in the documents. The documents are authentic, according to two people familiar with them and granted anonymity to describe internal communications. One of the people described the dossier as a preliminary version of Vance’s vetting file.

The research dossier was a 271-page document based on publicly available information about Vance’s past record and statements, with some — such as his past criticisms of Trump — identified in the document as “POTENTIAL VULNERABILITIES.” The person also sent part of a research document about Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who was also a finalist for the vice presidential nomination.

Note, this mirrors one of the first things Guccifer 2.0 released in 2016: Hillary’s oppo dossier on Trump. So in addition to its use of an AOL account, this persona is adopting another of the Russian persona’s tactics.

Again, I’m cool with outlets sitting on the dossier itself. But the content of it is newsworthy. That’s because after JD Vance’s rocky rollout, both donors and Trump himself are asking whether vetters were surprised by Vance’s misogynist public statements.

Over the past two weeks, Mr. Trump has fielded complaints from donors about his running mate, JD Vance, as news coverage exploring Mr. Vance’s past statements unearthed — and then exhaustively critiqued — remarks including a lament that America was run by “childless cat ladies.”

Mr. Trump dismissed out of hand donors’ suggestions that he replace Mr. Vance on the ticket. But Mr. Trump privately asked his advisers whether they had known about Mr. Vance’s comments about childless women before Mr. Trump chose him.

I’d also like to know if Trump’s vetting team knew of the pictures of JD wearing drag while at Yale, which have become the subject of memes on social media.

Whether the dossier was comprehensive matters (particularly given that a law firm also involved in Trump’s criminal defense completed it). It matters, most of all, because Trump has swapped the mediocre Ivanka as his primary familial advisor for the incompetent Don Jr, and the failson had a key role in picking JD.

So it would be newsworthy to reveal the scope and the thoroughness (or not) of the vetting document.

That said, I think every outlet that is sitting on these documents, particularly if they’re withholding details about any oversights in JD’s vetting document, owes the public an explanation of why they’re adopting a double standard as compared to their poor choices from 2016.

WaPo, which is trying to hunker through controversy about Will Lewis’ possible role in covering up Murdoch’s phone hacking,  tried to do that yesterday. Matt Murray boasted that outlets were taking a breath, and then went on to claim that the vetting document isn’t newsworthy because the six-month old vetting document isn’t, “fresh or new enough.”

“This episode probably reflects that news organizations aren’t going to snap at any hack that comes in and is marked as ‘exclusive’ or ‘inside dope’ and publish it for the sake of publishing,” said Matt Murray, executive editor of The Post. Instead, “all of the news organizations in this case took a deep breath and paused, and thought about who was likely to be leaking the documents, what the motives of the hacker might have been, and whether this was truly newsworthy or not.”

[snip]

“In the end, it didn’t seem fresh or new enough,” Murray said.

WaPo even attempted to address something virtually all discussions about using rat-fucked documents in the context of the suspected Iranian hack do not: the treatment of the Hunter Biden laptop, the most innocent provenance explanation for which is that, after pursuing a laptop from foreigners with ties to Russian intelligence for a year, Rudy Giuliani received just such a laptop out of the blue from a blind computer repairman.

Here’s what WaPo claims about how reserved news organizations were with the hard drives described as the Hunter Biden laptop.

News organizations have been tested since 2016. Wary of (1) hacked materials since then, many proved reluctant to report on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop out of concerns that they were the result of a hack. As the conservative press latched on to (2) allegedly incriminating emails found on the computer in the final weeks of the 2020 campaign, more mainstream outlets did not join in a 2016-style frenzy over the material, and Facebook and Twitter limited distribution of a New York Post story about the laptop.

An analysis by The Post nearly two years later confirmed the authenticity of many of the emails on the laptop and found no evidence of a hack. [my annotation]

Note the two reasons alluded to in this passage, both of which show up in Murray’s claimed explanation for sitting on the JD Vance dossier. There were two concerns, according to the WaPo:

1. Was the laptop “hacked”?
2. Did the “allegedly incriminating emails” prove what the NYPost claimed they did?

Then, in the next paragraph, WaPo addresses just one of those two issues, whether the hard drive copied from a copy of a laptop, was hacked. WaPo claims, falsely, that the linked story describing the results of Jake Williams and Matt Green’s analysis “found no evidence of a hack.”

For starters, that’s a category error. This is a copy of a copy of a laptop, not the laptop itself. What their analysis attempted to assess was the authenticity of the emails on the laptop — but two different security researchers were only able to do so for a fraction of the emails. This analysis made no attempt to assess whether the stuff on the laptop was packaged up from authentic files (or from a combination of authentic and doctored files). Far more importantly, given details of Hunter’s cloud accounts, it did not assess whether people besides Hunter Biden had access his cloud data (evidence at his gun case described that not just his mistress, Zoe Kestan, accessed his cloud data, but his drug dealers accessed at least his bank account).

But it did find that the copy of a copy of a laptop lacked marks of reliability and did include files placed there by someone other than Hunter Biden.

Most of the data obtained by The Post lacks cryptographic features that would help experts make a reliable determination of authenticity, especially in a case where the original computer and its hard drive are not available for forensic examination. Other factors, such as emails that were only partially downloaded, also stymied the security experts’ efforts to verify content.

[snip]

In their examinations, Green and Williams found evidence that people other than Hunter Biden had accessed the drive and written files to it, both before and after the initial stories in the New York Post and long after the laptop itself had been turned over to the FBI.

[snip]

“From a forensics standpoint, it’s a disaster,” Williams said. (The Post is paying Williams for the professional services he provided. Green declined payment.)

[snip]

Neither expert reported finding evidence that individual emails or other files had been manipulated by hackers, but neither was able to rule out that possibility.

[snip]

Analysis was made significantly more difficult, both experts said, because the data had been handled repeatedly in a manner that deleted logs and other files that forensic experts use to establish a file’s authenticity.

“No evidence of tampering was discovered, but as noted throughout, several key pieces of evidence useful in discovering tampering were not available,” Williams’ reports concluded.

There are several details, disclosed subsequent to the story, that it lacks: It doesn’t talk about the ways the story John Paul Mac Isaac’s attorney told WaPo conflict with the story JPMI would tell in his book (one very significant conflict pertains to the date when JPMI reached out to the FBI). It doesn’t describe that JPMI himself disavowed some of the content on the Jack Maxey hard drive, the one shared with the WaPo. It doesn’t describe that Hunter has sued Garrett Ziegler and Rudy Giuliani for hacking him (the former survived Ziegler’s motion to dismiss; the latter was dismissed pending the end of Rudy’s bankruptcy; as far as I know, Hunter has not yet renewed the suit against Rudy given the imminent dismissal of Rudy’s bankruptcy). It doesn’t describe that in court filings, Abbe Lowell affirmatively claimed that the data on the laptop itself — not the copy! — had been compromised before being shared with the FBI.

Defense counsel has numerous reasons to believe the data had been altered and compromised before investigators obtained the electronic material from Apple Inc. and The Mac Shop, such that the Special Counsel’s claim that the underlying data is “authentic” (id. at 4) and accurately reflects “defendant’s Apple Macbook Pro and [] hard drive” (id. at 2) is mistaken.

Mr. Biden’s counsel told the Special Counsel on May 10, 2024 it agrees not to challenge the authenticity of the electronic data the Special Counsel intends to use with respect to it being what law enforcement received on December 9, 2019 from John Paul Mac Isaac (owner of The Mac Shop), and from Apple on August 29, 2019 and in a follow-up search on July 10, 2020. (Mot. at n.3.) However, Mr. Biden cannot agree this electronic data is “authentic” as to being his data as he used and stored it prior to Mac Issac obtaining it.

WaPo relies on a two year old story that has been significantly preempted to claim that the copy of the copy of the laptop was not hacked. The story never made such a claim, and the claims it has made have been undermined since.

But there’s an even more telling aspect of WaPo’s self-satisfied claim that reporters gave up their rabid addiction for rat-fuckery after 2016. It doesn’t address whether the laptop subsequently became newsworthy.

There’s good reason for that: Because after the election, WaPo did embrace the laptop, even the doctored one they got from Maxey, as part of a years-long campaign of dick pic sniffing. Their lead dick pic sniffers, Matt Viser and Devlin Barrett, even made shit up when disgruntled IRS agents released details that raised questions about the integrity of the original copy. Since then, prosecutors themselves have described that the extraction of the copy of the laptop they received — the one whence all the data that sloppy reporters call “the laptop” came — is 62% bigger, measured in terms of pages, than the laptop itself. There are potentially innocent explanations for why the hard drive purporting to be a copy of the laptop would not match it, but those explanations would conflict with JPMI’s explanations for how he made the copy. And, scandalously, the FBI never made an index of the laptop, and Judge Maryellen Noreika allowed it to be used in the trial against Hunter without ever even assuring that the forensic reports on the extraction of the two devices matched what got certified to her in a court filing.

And WaPo is not alone in its continuing addiction to relying on a copy of a copy of a laptop with such provenance problems. Just yesterday, NYT’s Ken Vogel did a story that relied on the laptop which basically said, Hunter Biden asked the Commerce Department for help on Burisma but it blew him off (unsurprisingly, Vogel also struggles with the court filings on which he bases his news hook). Four years after Vogel’s chum Rudy Giuliani released the laptop, three weeks after Joe Biden dropped out, NYT is still reporting the absence of news in an 8-year old email as news, precisely the kind of attention suck that rat-fuckers seek when they provide stolen documents to people like Vogel.

Again, in my opinion, WaPo is right not to publish the JD Vance dossier, though that’s different than using it to assess whether there were big gaps in the vetting of Trump’s unpopular running mate.

But WaPo is telling fairy tales about whether mainstream outlets gave up their fondness for rat-fuckery.

They did not. For four years, they have been utterly addicted to the rat-fuckery of the laptop, to the exclusion of reporting on all the details that should raise cautions disclosed since then.

And as such, the decision not to embrace this rat-fuckery, however correct it might be, is a double standard.

Yeah, I know. I know.

I should have immediately written up the news — first reported by WaPo and then matched by CNN — that Roger Stone was hacked by suspected Iranian hackers and then his compromised account was used in an attempt to compromise a top Trump advisor.

Trump’s rat-fucker provided an interview in a story that WaPo appears to have subsequently buried, one in which the habitual liar claimed he was cooperating.

People familiar with the matter said the phishing attempt appears to have succeeded in compromising the communications of at least one person not formally connected to either campaign: Roger Stone, a longtime friend and adviser to Trump.

“I was informed by the authorities that a couple of my personal email accounts have been compromised,” Stone said in a brief interview. “I really don’t know more about it. And I’m cooperating. It’s all very strange.”

Stone’s account was used to send emails to the Trump campaign containing a link that, if clicked, could have allowed Iran to intercept the target’s other emails, the people familiar with the matter said.

His long-time lawyer, Grant Smith, confirmed Roger’s purported cooperation to CNN.

The FBI and other investigators probing the apparent hack-and-leak of Trump campaign documents, which Donald Trump has blamed on Iran, suspect that the hackers were able to compromise the personal email account of longtime Republican and Trump operative Roger Stone, multiple sources familiar with the matter told CNN.

The hackers used access to Stone’s email account to try to break into the account of a senior Trump campaign official as part of a persistent effort to access campaign networks, one of the sources said. The hacking incident, which occurred in June, set off a scramble in the Trump campaign, the FBI and Microsoft, which spotted the intrusion attempts, to contain the incident and to determine if there was a broader cyber threat from Iran.

Stone was informed by Microsoft and the FBI that his personal email was compromised by a “Foreign State Actor,” with the intention of utilizing the account to phish officials in the Trump campaign into opening a link that would give perpetrators access to that person’s computer, one of the sources familiar said.

“Mr. Stone was contacted about this matter by Microsoft and the FBI and continues to cooperate with both,” said Grant Smith, an attorney for the Republican operative. “Mr. Stone will have no further comment at this time.”

Maybe we’ll get around to uncertainty over whether Stone was the account whence, Microsoft describes, someone on the Trump team was targeted or the more interesting question of whether Iran, or someone else, is the source of the files shared with Politico, WaPo, and NYT. Thus far, it seems clear that three Biden-Harris people avoided being hacked and the Trump advisor may have avoided being hacked too.

It’s just Roger, so far.

Until we learn more (such as the source of the materials shared with the press, which Roger Stone wouldn’t have an obvious purpose to have), the involvement of Roger in this — the fact that Iran successfully pwned him, of all people — is interesting for a different reason.

If you ignore the whole Andrii Derkach information operation from 2020 (which, questions about Hunter Biden’s laptop aside, didn’t involve digital compromise), the most successful known operation from 2020 actually involved the Iranians.

As former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Chris Krebs (who has already weighed in that this Iranian attempt is serious) described it in his January 6 Committee, some Iranian actors pretending to be Proud Boys targeted Democrats and pushed them to vote for Trump.

So I give you an example. 2020, October 22nd and 23rd, a series of emails start popping up in people’s email in-boxes throughout Florida and elsewhere. The emails claim to be from the Proud Boys, and they are saying, hey — and they tend to be targeting Democrats and – registered Democrats at least. And so the claims say, hey, we know you’re a registered Democrat. You have to change your registration and vote for Trump.

If you don’t, we’re going to come after you and we’ll know who you voted for.

And so we saw these coming in. And we —you know, the way we would address — deal with this, with any of these themes or claims is we would just systematically reverse engineer the claim. So the claim here is that we will know who you voted for. So it’s the law of the land in all 50 States of a secret ballot. That’s kind of the magic of American elections.

And so that was the hook for us, to say, these sorts of emails are coming out. The –it’s actually untrue that anyone would ever know who you voted for unless you tell them.

There is a secret ballot. So disregard, this is disinfo.

And that was the crux of rumor control, which we launched that Monday or Tuesday of the week of 21, 22, whatever it was, October.

[snip]

Q Now, I don’t want you to get into certainly any classified information, but I do think you’ve spoken publicly or it was disclosed that it turns out it was a foreign actor involved with the Proud Boys emails.

A It was Iran. Yes. And we went from first discovery of that email 11 a.m., 2 noonish maybe, when reports came out on Tuesday to standing in FBI headquarters that evening, Wednesday evening about 7 p.m., attributing that attack to Iranian — that influence operation to Iranian actors.

In other words, in 2020, Iran used the threat of Roger Stone’s mob, the Proud Boys, to intimidate Democratic voters (precisely the danger that made Stone’s threats to both Randy Credico and Amy Berman Jackson so bad during the Mueller investigation and aftermath).

And then, of all the people to exploit as a way to get to Trump, Iran chooses Trump’s rat-fucker, the same guy with close ties to the Proud Boys?

Iran seems to have a thing for Roger and his mob.

There’s a funny structure to WaPo’s story, bylined by five journalists, on Elon Musk’s chat with Donald Trump.

After discussing the technical problems that delayed the chat for 40 minutes — which Musk attributed to a DDOS attack, a claim anonymous Xitter employees disputed — it described how Musk “allowed the former president to deliver his preferred talking points and a stream of false statements” and mostly kept it comfortable. Then it contrasted that chatty style with the “challenging questions” Rachel Scott and Kadia Goba asked at the NABJ.

Musk billed the conversation with Trump as “unscripted with no limits on subject matter.” But during much of the discussion, he focused on comfortable topics for Trump, such as undocumented immigration. He also allowed the former president to deliver his preferred talking points and a stream of false statements, giving the chat some of the hallmarks of Trump’s signature campaign rallies.

The friendly conversation came after Trump reacted combatively to challenging questions at the National Association of Black Journalists convention — and as the GOP nominee is also attacking Harris for not doing interviews since she announced her campaign for president. Trump reiterated that criticism of Harris on the X Space and repeated his frequent claim that Harris’s rise to the top of the Democratic ticket amounted to a “coup.”

Those were paragraphs three and four.

Twelve paragraphs later, WaPo mentioned — with no comment on any challenge presented by journalists involved — the presser last week, where journalists allowed Trump to make the very same attacks that Musk did.

He has drawn headlines for falsely questioning her heritage, reigniting a feud with Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) and holding a meandering news conference last week.

It’s as if there were no journalists with agency at that presser.

In his first three paragraphs, NYT’s Michael Gold was more succinct. He focused on technical issues, softball questions, and false claims.

What was supposed to be Donald J. Trump’s triumphant return to a social-media platform central to his presidency was marred by glitches on Monday night, when a livestreamed conversation on X between Mr. Trump and its owner, Elon Musk, was significantly delayed by technical issues.

But once their chat began, 40 minutes after it was scheduled, Mr. Musk’s and Mr. Trump’s newly developed camaraderie was on clear display, with the billionaire tech entrepreneur lobbing softball questions that allowed Mr. Trump to rattle off the talking points that have animated his presidential campaign.

The conversation offered little new information about Mr. Trump’s views. Over the course of more than two hours, Mr. Trump attacked Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent, as a “phony” who, along with President Biden, failed to address crossings at the U.S. border with Mexico. He repeated a number of false claims, including that the 2020 election was rigged, the criminal cases against him were a conspiracy by the Biden administration to undermine his candidacy and the leaders of other nations were deliberately sending criminals and “their nonproductive people” to America.

Sure, like WaPo, eight paragraphs later, he contrasted that to the NABJ appearance. But he also suggested that poor Mr. Trump grew frustrated at his own press conference.

Last month, Mr. Trump was combative while being interviewed by a panel of Black female journalists at a National Association of Black Journalists convention, where he questioned Ms. Harris’s racial identity. Last week, he grew frustrated by questioning at a hastily scheduled news conference in Palm Beach, Fla., where his answers often meandered and a story he told about a helicopter ride drew significant scrutiny.

Apparently, Gold is so entranced with the three days NYT squandered by chasing down Trump’s false helicopter story he hasn’t figured out that it was no more than a vehicle for more lies about Kamala Harris.

Ultimately, though, the presser was the same: beset by technical problems created because journalists didn’t have mics, largely characterized by softball questions, and riddled with false claims.

Heck, even the combative (if you ignore Harris Faulkner) NABJ interview was also delayed, in part, by technical issues (though also Trump’s refusal to allow live fact-checking) and riddled with the same lies he keeps telling, including the attack on the authenticity of Kamala’s Blackness.

Gold complains that Musk’s conversation “offered little new information about Mr. Trump’s views.” But actual journalists could do no better. Importantly, Trump’s frustrations at the presser came in response to questions about crowd size and his flaccid campaign; Trump’s insecurities are nothing new.

The only thing that distinguished yesterday’s event from the one many mainstream campaign journalists validated with their participation is that Trump slurred his speech more yesterday.

My point is not that there’s some secret formula to elicit actual, truthful answers from Donald Trump. Trump doesn’t believe in truth; he believes in leveraging lies to exercise power. So no standard interview format will pin the man down.

Rather, it’s that journalists are indulging their own vanity by imagining they’re doing any better than Elon Musk.

Given that that’s the case — given that Trump’s attacks on the press have rendered them little more than props in his reality show — journalists ought to reflect on their own failures before they continue to screech that Kamala Harris, who in 23 days has vetted and picked a running mate, added key staffers, and done fairly epic campaign appearances in six swing states, has yet to offer a press conference to many of the same journalists who could do nothing more than make Trump squirm about crowd size.

I’m not saying a press conference with diligent journalists would not have value. I’m saying that if you struggle to distinguish the outcome of questioning from people being paid as professional journalists from what Elon Musk can elicit, your complaint is with the journalists, not Kamala Harris.

And until you fix that problem — until you fix all the inanity driven by a focus on the horse race rather than the outcomes — these journalists would offer little more than conflict narrative and drama if given the chance to question the Vice President about her campaign.

Update: In a piece calling on VP Harris to give a presser not because it’ll help but because it’s the right thing to do, Margaret Sullivan lays out all the inadequacies of journalists clamoring for one.

[W]hen the vice-president has interacted with reporters in recent weeks, as in a brief “gaggle” during a campaign stop, the questions were silly. Seeking campaign drama rather than substance, they centered on Donald Trump’s attacks or when she was planning to do a press conference. The former president, meanwhile, does talk to reporters, but he lies constantly; NPR tracked 162 lies and distortions in his hour-long press conference last week at Mar-a-Lago.

But Harris needs to overcome these objections and do what’s right.

She is running for the highest office in the nation, perhaps the most powerful perch in the world, and she owes it to every US citizen to be frank and forthcoming about what kind of president she intends to be.

To tell us – in an unscripted, open way – what she stands for.

[snip]

I don’t have a lot of confidence that the broken White House press corps would skillfully elicit the answers to those and other germane questions if given the chance. But Harris should show that she understands that, in a democracy, the press – at least in theory – represents the public, and that the sometimes adversarial relationship between the press and government is foundational.

Last October, I wrote a post called “Elon Musk’s Machine for Fascism,” describing how Twitter had twice served Donald Trump’s electoral ambitions.

In 2016, trolls — including Don Jr — workshopped memes on a DM list and then used their reach to pressure MSM to adopt their narratives. In 2020, trolls — including Trump himself, his two sons, and other key advisors — used the platform to sow intentional disinformation about the election. Only by shutting down Trump’s account after January 6 was he prevented from further sowing violence in advance of Joe Biden’s inauguration.

Since then, Elon Musk has bought the platform and right wingers have successfully pushed to defund any effective civil society checks on the social media platform.

As I reflected last year, Musk’s purchase of Xitter seemed to be an effort to perfect on the 2016 and 2020 models.

By welcoming outright Nazis to the platform, though, he has undermined its ability to reach traditional journalists and normies, which made me hope that some of Xitter’s past utility to fascists might be weakened.

But in the last year, Musk and his far right allies have tested another model. First in Ireland and more recently and systematically in the UK, far right thugs like Tommy Robinson have used Xitter to enflame far right violence masquerading as organic anti-immigrant unrest.

Even before Musk got involved, high profile accounts on Xitter magnified disinformation from other platforms.

Much of the false information about the attack seemed to come from a website called Channel 3 Now, which generates video reports that look like mainstream news channels. But its video and its false claims about the name of the attacker might have stayed relatively obscure if they were not highlighted by larger accounts.

On X, users with considerable followings quickly shared that video and spread it across the site. And on other platforms such as TikTok – where videos can go viral quickly even if the accounts posting them do not have large followings, because of the app’s algorithm – they racked up hundreds of thousands of views. At some point, the false name of the attacker was a trending search on both TikTok and X, meaning that it showed to users who might otherwise have shown no interest in it at all.

But Musk did get involved personally, repeatedly stoking more violence.

Elon Musk just can’t help himself.

The billionaire X owner sparked fury in the British government this weekend after he responded to incendiary footage of the far-right disorder that’s sweeping the country by saying “civil war is inevitable.”

The post on X was roundly condemned by U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s office, which said there was “no justification” for Musk’s comments.

But Musk doubled, tripled, then quadrupled down after that dig. Responding to a statement from Starmer vowing his government would “not tolerate attacks on mosques or on Muslim communities,” the X boss effectively accused the British prime minister of wearing blinkers. “Shouldn’t you be concerned about attacks on all communities?” Policing of the unrest “does seem one-sided,” he offered in a third post.

He then branded Starmer “#twotierkeir” — riffing on a popular far-right talking point that British police treat disorder by white people differently to that by perpetrated by minorities. Justice Minister Heidi Alexander called Musk “deplorable.”

Musk has complained about British efforts to police content that, in the UK, is illegal.

And things would be worse in the US, because the laws against incitement are far more limited.

Plus, Xitter has twice fought back against legal process, one time on behalf of Donald Trump.

Xitter has also throttled pro-Kamala Harris accounts, even as Musk repeatedly boosts Trump.

Today, in advance of an “interview” with Musk and the roll-out by Trump’s sons of a new crypto currency scam and on the 7th anniversary of the Charlottesville riot, Donald Trump returned to Xitter.

The second I saw video of Vice President Harris rolling up to a hangar at Detroit’s airport on Air Force Two, then alighting with Tim Walz in front of cheering crowds, I knew it would break Donald Trump’s brain.

This is the kind of spectacle Donald Trump excels at creating.

This is the kind of spectacle on which Trump has built slavering loyalty from millions of MAGAts who see power in such spectacle.

And a Black woman created it.

Or rather, a Black woman and her campaign team, a campaign team which has already demonstrated they know exactly how to trigger Donald Trump, created it.

And sure enough, it did melt his brain.

Yesterday, he adopted the hysterical claims of some of his followers, posting that Vice President Harris was cheating because (he falsely claimed) she had used AI to sub in a crowd of people who weren’t there.

In fact, some of Trump’s followers were the ones who had used AI, sometimes marked as fake, sometimes not. to give the appearance this crowd didn’t exist.

Trump’s claims are so obviously false that even right wing trolls like Ian Miles Cheong are criticizing him for it.

And Cheong is not the only right wing troll complaining that Trump is hurting the movement, their movement, with his unhinged response to Vice President Harris’ rally. At a time when some prominent right wing trolls are showing RFK-curiosity, they’re also questioning the campaign, in significant part because of Trump’s public meltdown over this arrival.

And that’s where things start to get weird.

Both WaPo and NYT reported overnight on Trump’s unhinged claim.

But they’re both missing a bit of what’s going on, and they’re missing it, in my opinion, because they’re still seeing this race from Trump’s perspective.

In a piece on Saturday, WaPo claimed that Democrats were obsessing over crowd size in their own right, citing Tim Walz’ boast about crowd size in a Friday rally in Phoenix, even while (in the penultimate paragraph) quoting a Harris spox mocking Trump for the meltdowns he has in response.

Then the vice-presidential pick beamed out at the audience in suburban Phoenix — more than 15,000 people, Democrats said — and delivered the punchline with a big grin.

“It’s not as if anybody cares about crowd sizes or anything,” Walz said.

For years Trump, the GOP nominee for president, has been the one boasting about how many people he could pack into a venue. Now Democrats are eager to play the crowd game, too. With enthusiasm surging for their new presidential ticket, they have spent the week needling Trump on a topic he famously obsesses over.

[snip]

Harris campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said Trump has been “rage-Truthing about our grassroots enthusiasm and melting down publicly, both online and in front of cameras” while Harris and Walz hit battleground states.

After Trump’s unhinged post yesterday, WaPo and NYT observed that Harris’ campaign has begun to mock Trump for complaining about coverage of her crowds. WaPo’s version links back to the earlier piece treating this primarily as mere boasting.

Trump’s focus on crowd size also has become something that the Harris campaign has used to poke fun at Trump about — while at the same time bragging about their own crowds.

But they’re suggesting it only started in Phoenix on Friday, after the Trump presser.

That is, they’re misunderstanding the timeline, and therefore the full effect of it.

Both cite Trump’s conflated boast, given in his unhinged presser on Thursday, that his January 6 crowds were bigger than Martin Luther King Jr’s (this is the NYT; note, logically Trump must also be conflating January 6 and his inauguration, which is the only event where he occupied the same real estate MLK did).

Mr. Trump did not hold any events in a swing state last week. Instead, he held a rally in Montana, where there is a crucial Senate race, and a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago property in Florida.

Mr. Trump showed frustration with Ms. Harris’s crowds at that event, too, and even boasted about the crowd at his rally in Washington D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021, that preceded the riot at the Capitol, saying it was larger than the one drawn by Martin Luther King Jr. for his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

“Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me,” Mr. Trump claimed.

But they’re missing that the presser and the wildly inflated claims about crowd size took place the day after Kamala’s iconic arrival in Detroit. They’re missing that Trump’s first attempt to dismiss the Vice President’s crowd size came in that presser.

Trump announced the presser first thing in the morning on Thursday, to take place in conjunction with a briefing, purporting to inform reporters about the state of Trump’s campaign, already scheduled that day. So the presser would have come together in the period when Trump was seeing — and responding to — that imagery.

Trump called the presser when his brain was breaking after seeing this image.

And many people, including NYT’s weird write-up of the presser as if it were sound campaign strategy, did not report that in addition to inflating his own crowd sizes, Trump was falsely claiming that Kamala’s crowds were an order of magnitude smaller than they were.

Former President Donald J. Trump tried on Thursday to shoehorn himself back into a national conversation that Vice President Kamala Harris has dominated for more than two weeks, holding an hourlong news conference in which he assailed Ms. Harris’s intelligence and taunted her for failing to field questions similarly from journalists.

Throughout the event, held in the main room at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and home in Palm Beach, Fla., Mr. Trump assailed the state of the U.S. economy, described the country as in mortal danger if he did not win the presidential election and falsely described his departure from the White House — which was preceded by his refusal to concede his election loss in November 2020 and the violent attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by a mob of his supporters — as a “peaceful” transfer of power.

Mr. Trump also flashed frustration when asked about the size of Ms. Harris’s crowds while boasting about the attendance at his own rally on Jan. 6, 2021, and insisted that the group of hundreds that stormed the Capitol was relatively small. But he fixated on the size of the crowd that he initially gathered on the national mall, making comparisons to — and declaring it was larger than — the one drawn by Martin Luther King Jr. for his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

“Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me,” Mr. Trump said. “If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours — same real estate, same everything, same number of people, if not — we had more.”

The Trump team has been looking for ways to interrupt Ms. Harris’s momentum as she has quickly consolidated the Democratic Party behind her and risen in the polls. The goal of Mr. Trump’s news conference, which he announced on Thursday morning on his social media site, was to highlight that Ms. Harris has yet to hold a news conference of her own or to give an unscripted interview to the news media.

On top of describing many of Trump’s false claims — that Kamala is stupid, that the economy is in poor shape, that Kamala was border czar and has let other countries unload prisons into the US, that the legal system was unfair to him, that crime is up — without correcting them, NYT only mentioned Trump’s false comparisons of his own rallies (again, without correction), not his claim that Harris had been getting 1,500 rally-goers, as opposed to 15,000.

Oh give me a break.

Listen. I had 107,000 people in New Jersey. You didn’t report it.

I’m so glad you asked. What did she have yesterday? 2,000 people?

If I ever had 2,000 people you’d say my campaign is finished. It’s so dishonest, the press. And here’s a great example.

I had, in Michigan recently, 25,000 people, and 25,000 people we just couldn’t get them in. We had, in Harrisburg, 20, 25,000 people? And 20,000 people couldn’t get in. We had so many — nobody ever mentions that!

When she gets 1,500 people — and I saw it yesterday on ABC, which they said, “oh, the crowd was so big,” — I have 10 times, 20 times, 30 times the crowd size, and they never say the crowd was big.

That’s why I’m always saying, “turn around the cameras.”

I’m so glad you asked that.

I think it’s so terrible, when you say, “she has 1,500 people, 1,000 people,” and they talk about, “oh, the enthusiasm.” Let me tell you. We have the enthusiasm. The Republican Party — and me, as a candidate — but the Republican Party has the enthusiasm, because people want to see crime stopped, they want to see a country that’s respected.

Trump’s false claims about this Detroit rally started when the wound was still fresh. Trump’s false claims started last Thursday, but few mentioned them as false claims until he went wildly unhinged on his social media site.

And understand: Harris’ campaign is intentionally goading him, intentionally causing these psychic wounds, and they were even before the Detroit rally.

I have no reason to believe that Harris’ campaign had the event in the airport hangar to prepare that spectacle (I think they had to move there once they overfilled their first venue), but holy hell it was great advance work. That said, their rapid response has been deliberately needling the former President with crowd size comparisons, going back a week now, days before Walz was even selected.

After both Georgia,

And Philly,

Kamala HQ posted side-by-side comparisons and, in the latter case, posted it to Truth Social. And Trump invited these comparisons when he booked a rally in the same Georgia auditorium as Kamala chose to do her rally. Trump made excuses for his paltry turnout in real time.

Trump invited this comparison, then failed to match up.

And the Kamala HQ account’s first take on Trump’s unhinged presser captioned it, “A feeble Trump holds a press conference to lie and yell about his noticeably smaller rally crowd sizes.”

Harris’ own campaign is not the only outlet that understood what was going on. Rolling Stone focused on Trump’s obsession about Harris’ crowd size on August 8, not long after the presser, which the KamalaHQ account noted and @ed Trump on.

According to one Republican source who’s spoken to the former president in recent days, Trump is “unhappy with the narrative” forming that Vice President Kamala Harris has been attracting high, enthusiastic attendance at the 2024 rallies she’s held since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.

In private, Trump has recently taken to griping about the media attention the Harris 2024 (now Harris-Walz 2024) rally sizes have been receiving, and at times insisting a number the Harris campaign has put out must be “fake,” the source and another person familiar with the matter say.

And NYT hasn’t been entirely missing this. On August 9, they updated a story posted on August 4 about Trump’s excuses for his thin Georgia turnout.

Still, Mr. Trump couldn’t help but focus on those who weren’t piling in. He claimed that Georgia State University officials in charge of the arena prevented him from letting in more people. “We have beautiful cameras set up for the overflow crowds,” he said. A massive screen flashed to a live video feed of his red-capped supporters milling around outside in the 90-degree heat.

In Mr. Trump’s telling, this wasn’t a safety protocol but a conspiracy to humiliate him, perpetrated by the university and other nefarious forces. It all connects, in his estimation, to the biggest numbers game he has ever lost. “If they’re going to stand in the way of admitting people to our rally, just imagine what they’re going to do on Election Day,” he said.

This goes to the core of Mr. Trump’s crowd-size fixation. He seems to believe that a full arena is a predictor of his ultimate victory — as if the voters in that arena were representative of the country at large.

[snip]

[A]n hour into his speech, the Atlanta crowd had emptied out more than usual.

This is a known trigger for Trump. It has been, going back to his own meager inauguration turnout. It has been racialized since that point too, Trump’s insecurities knowing that a Black president could be more popular than he was.

Further, brags about crowd size are a known building block of Trump’s own false claims about elections. In 2020, for example, he argued it was impossible that Biden beat him because he never left his basement. There are still millions of people who believe Trump’s 2020 Big Lie because they believe his claim that crowd size directly translates to votes.

This time around, Trump is giving pressers in the equivalent of his own basement, arguing that so many people voted for him in Alabama and South Carolina in 2020, he must have won Georgia, even while he inflates his own crowd sizes by an order of magnitude and deflates the Vice President’s by the same margin.

The stakes, for Trump, have to do with his Big Lie, his ability to sustain the belief of his mob that he really is that much more popular than his opponent. He can’t have them see that Kamala can do crowds better even than he can.

Beyond triggering Trump, beyond goading him into melting down in front of campaign journalists, that’s actually not how the Harris campaign views it (nor should it be, in a competent campaign): The WaPo’s description of Trump’s false claims describe Harris boasting of new volunteers being recruited.

And at a fundraising event in San Francisco on Sunday, Harris appeared to address Trump’s social media accusations indirectly.

The energy around the country is “undeniable,” Harris said, adding, “The press and our opponents like to focus on our crowd size, and yes the crowds are large.” But even better, she said, attendees are signing up for volunteer shifts by the thousands.

This is actually the purpose rallies are supposed to serve at this point of a campaign, even one launched a mere three weeks ago. These crowds are important not (just) because they lead Trump to melt down, but because they’re a necessary way to catch up on volunteer recruitment Biden hadn’t been doing. This is why Walz, especially, makes an ask at every one of these rallies. This is why Kamala always talks about the hard work ahead.

This is about recruiting bodies to do voter identification, persuasion, and ultimately GOTV. This is about basic campaign work.

Trump, meanwhile, has sent JD out to speak to empty parking lots.

Pro-Trump trolls like Cheong see this. But full time campaign journalists are slow to catch on. They’re slow to understand that Trump’s own insecurities can be — and were, deliberately — triggered, with predictable results.

Especially when someone can mobilize the kind of spectacle that Trump himself relies on.

When news first broke that Donald Trump’s campaign says it has been hacked, I started drafting a post on applying the lessons of past ratfucks.

The alleged hack was first reported by Politico, which says some person using an AOL account reached out and shared documents, including the vetting materials pertaining to JD Vance and Marco Rubio.

On July 22, POLITICO began receiving emails from an anonymous account. Over the course of the past few weeks, the person — who used an AOL email account and identified themselves only as “Robert” — relayed what appeared to be internal communications from a senior Trump campaign official. A research dossier the campaign had apparently done on Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, which was dated Feb. 23, was included in the documents. The documents are authentic, according to two people familiar with them and granted anonymity to describe internal communications. One of the people described the dossier as a preliminary version of Vance’s vetting file.

The research dossier was a 271-page document based on publicly available information about Vance’s past record and statements, with some — such as his past criticisms of Trump — identified in the document as “POTENTIAL VULNERABILITIES.” The person also sent part of a research document about Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who was also a finalist for the vice presidential nomination.

Trump’s bouncer-spox, Steven Cheung, claims the hack was done by Iran, citing a Microsoft report released Friday describing the compromise by Iran of the email account of a “former senior advisor,” which the IRGC then used to attempt to compromise a current high-level official.

Yet another Iranian group, this one connected with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, sent a spear phishing email in June to a high-ranking official on a presidential campaign from the compromised email account of a former senior advisor. The email contained a link that would direct traffic through a domain controlled by the group before routing to the website of the provided link. Within days of this activity, the same group unsuccessfully attempted to log into an account belonging to a former presidential candidate. We’ve since notified those targeted.

A pity for the Trump campaign that Cheung is a habitual liar, so we can’t trust anything he says, and Politico’s authentication appears to rely exclusively on word of mouth from those who have the documents, not digital authentication.

Still, it’s distinctly possible. The FBI certainly seems to believe the IRGC is trying to assassinate Trump.

The lessons I was going to propose in my draft post were the following:

• Vice President Harris should eschew assigning her senior-most staff to exploiting these emails like Trump did in 2016.
• But only after Trump, Don Jr, and Mike Pompeo apologize for their enthusiastic use of hacked emails in 2016.
• The same 51 former spooks who warned that the Hunter Biden laptop had the earmarks of a foreign influence operation should write a similar letter here, emphasizing (as they did in their Hunter Biden letter) the import of resisting foreign efforts to influence a presidential election. Maybe Peter Strzok and Andy McCabe could join in. Chris Krebs, who already has weighed in validating the seriousness of the threat, but who was fired for telling the truth about the 2020 election, can join too. They should send it to Politico, which first reported this story, but CC Jim Jordan, who says even writing such a letter is an abuse of First Amendment protected free speech.
• Donald Trump must provide all the affected servers to the FBI, stat.

It’s the last one that was going to be my punch line. Partly because of misleading (arguably inaccurate) Jim Comey testimony, and partly because a wide swath of people had an incentive to do Russia’s bidding, for eight years people, including many in Congress, have been suggesting that a hacking victim must give all the servers that were hacked to law enforcement — the actual servers, not forensic images — otherwise the FBI’s investigation would be suspect.

They were wrong on several counts. But they were loud and insistent.

Fine. Based on that precedent, Trump must hand over his campaign servers to the same FBI that has criminally investigated him, including his campaign finance shenanigans, immediately.

That’s what I was going to write when Politico’s Alex Isenstadt, who is not a journalist competent to report a hack-and-leak story, was the only one who had written this up.

But then WaPo wrote it up, with Trump-whisperer Josh Dawsey and horserace journo Isaac Arnsdorf bylined, but also Ellen Nakashima and Shane Harris, the latter two of whom are exceptional reporters for a story about hacking.

That story had two additional details that made me rethink the potential impact of this. First, it revealed that Trump didn’t tell the FBI about the hack.

People familiar with the matter said the campaign separately concluded earlier this summer its email system had been breached but did not disclose it publicly or to law enforcement. The people said some officials were told to take more protective measures on their email accounts. At the time, campaign officials communicated to others that they weren’t sure who hacked the emails.

It’s not even clear whether Trump got an outside contractor — and if so, if it was someone more competent than Rudy Giuliani, whom Trump once pitched as a cybersecurity expert — to help clean up this mess. It took Crowdstrike and the DNC over a month to attribute the Russian hack, but they never fully cleaned it up. And persistent attacks continued through the election. That is, even with a respected outside contractor, the Democrats were wasting energy on whack-a-mole defense efforts for the remainder of the election.

Against that background, WaPo’s description of what the persona shared becomes more alarming.

On Thursday, The Washington Post was also sent a 271-page document about Vance from a sender who called himself Robert and used an AOL email account. Dated Feb. 23 and labeled “privileged & confidential,” the document highlighted potential political vulnerabilities for the first-term senator. Two people familiar with the document confirmed it was authentic and was commissioned by the campaign from Brand Woodward, a law firm that represents a number of prominent Trump advisers in investigations by state and federal authorities.

The document drew from publicly available information, including past news reports and interviews with the senator. The campaign commissioned several reports of other candidates, too, the advisers said.

The sender would not speak on the telephone with a Post reporter but indicated they had access to additional information, including internal campaign emails and documents related to Trump’s court cases. [my emphasis]

First, Brand Woodward did the campaign’s vetting.

Stan Woodward represents, along with others, Walt Nauta, Kash Patel, and Peter Navarro in various Trump-related criminal investigations, as well as some seditionists. He’s a great fit for Trump insofar as he’s good at generating outrage over manufactured slights — though in front of regular judges, those complaints usually collapse. Multiple filings in the documents case suggest that Woodward has a tenuous relationship with digital technology.

The role of Stan Brand, Woodward’s partner, has been assiduously hidden, except insofar as he has made claims about cases to the press on-the-record without disclosing the tie to Woodward.

Now, WaPo has confirmed that the Microsoft description — of a former advisor pwned and using that person’s email account, an attempt to hack “a high-official” still on the campaign — pertained to the Trump campaign. Given that description, there’s no reason to believe that Woodward or Brand were affected.

But there’s nevertheless a problem with hiring Brand Woodward to do your candidate vetting. To be clear: Brand is absolutely qualified to do that kind of thing. He’s got a long record of doing so in congress. But even Trump appears to have concerns about major issues the vetting process missed, to say nothing of his donors.

Over the past two weeks, Mr. Trump has fielded complaints from donors about his running mate, JD Vance, as news coverage exploring Mr. Vance’s past statements unearthed — and then exhaustively critiqued — remarks including a lament that America was run by “childless cat ladies.”

Mr. Trump dismissed out of hand donors’ suggestions that he replace Mr. Vance on the ticket. But Mr. Trump privately asked his advisers whether they had known about Mr. Vance’s comments about childless women before Mr. Trump chose him.

There were better choices to vet candidates, but if Trump wants to let a thin team vet the surly troll he picked to be his running mate, that’s his own business.

My alarm about the news that Brand Woodward starts, however, by the way that the Trump campaign has muddled various functions, criminal and civil defense with campaign finance and, now, candidate vetting. It creates a legal morass, one that — if Trump loses this election — could lead to more legal trouble down the road.

Maybe that’s why Trump didn’t call the FBI.

But it also means that some people — most notably, Susie Wiles and Boris Epshteyn, along with Woodward and Brand — are playing multiple functions. Wiles is the one who decides who gets their criminal defense bills paid, she’s also the one who decides how to spend campaign cash, and she was a big backer of the JD pick.

When people play overlapping functions like that, it means that a hack targeted at them for one function — say, candidate vetting — may strike a gold mine of documents pertaining to another function — say, criminal defense.

WaPo’s reference to “documents related to Trump’s court cases” — Politico quoted the persona offering a “variety of documents from [Trump’s] legal and court documents to internal campaign discussions” — may ultimately pertain exclusively to Trump’s electoral court cases. If it does, those could be some of the most newsworthy out there, since Trump’s electoral court cases pose a direct threat to democracy.

But what if they don’t? What if these documents pertain to what those overlap people — people like Wiles or Epshteyn, and they’re only two of the most obvious –know about Trump’s criminal cases? What if they pertain to claims that witnesses have made to the FBI about where documents got moved or what was included in them? What if they pertain to the actual documents Trump stole, starting with the US strategic plan against Iran that Trump shared with Mark Meadows’ ghost writers?

Trump has not firewalled his campaign from a criminal case involving the most sensitive documents of the US government, meaning a well-executed hack targeted at his campaign may turn into an intelligence bonanza.

If Iran plans to make things difficult for Trump, the problems may extend well beyond what documents get leaked. As they did in 2016, this could mean that Trump wastes resources having to serially defend against hacking attempts via a range of different platforms. It could mean that Iran does what Russia did, hack key strategic models to optimize other kinds of fuckery later in the election. Because — unlike Russia — Iran is actively trying to kill Trump, not just defeat him, hacked documents may also facilitate efforts like those charged against Asif Merchant, manufacturing fake protests to create distractions to facilitate an assassination attempt.

The question of how to approach this news, if it is further confirmed, goes well beyond the question of whether to publish the documents allegedly stolen by Iran. In significant part because Trump refuses to maintain boundaries between his political life and his criminal life, hacks from Iran could create real damage to the United States beyond what they do to Trump’s campaign.

So by all means, let’s pause for a moment of schadenfreude. Let’s review all the things Trump said and did in 2016 and 2020 (including with the Hunter Biden laptop) that invite his opponents to fully exploit stolen documents this time.

But as you do that, consider that this ratfuck may be far more dangerous to the US than those targeting Hillary and Hunter.

Two days and at least ten journalists later, we finally have an explanation for Trump’s story claiming to have almost died with Willie Brown.

As Politico first reported, Trump did almost crash in one of his helicopters with a Black politician. But it was former Los Angeles city councilman Nate Holden, not former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown.

Trump’s former Executive Vice President Barbara Res wrote about it in her book.

On that ride, she said the pilots started feverishly maneuvering the equipment as the chopper lurched over the water. “From the corner of my eye, I can see in the cockpit and what I see is the co-pilot pumping a device with all his might,” Res wrote in her book. Donald Trump and Robert Trump were reassuring Holden.

“Very shortly thereafter the pilot let us know he had lost some instruments and we would need to make an emergency landing,” she wrote. “By now, the helicopter was shaking like crazy.”

After considerable turbulence, they landed safely in New Jersey at an airport where Trump had his commuter helicopters stored.

As Holden described it, he came onto the flight already worried because another of Trump’s helicopters had just gone down, killing three of Trump’s executives.

Holden recalled being a bit worried about the helicopter ride because it came not long after five people, including three high-level executives of Trump’s casinos, were killed when their chopper crashed in 1989 over Forked River, N.J.

But Holden says Trump told him they were in good hands, noting that he had two capable pilots. “He tells me to ‘look at the sky,’” Holden said. ‘Oh my God, it’s so beautiful.’”

At about the time Politico was publishing this story, Trump was on the phone with Maggie Haberman, complaining about the original NYT story reporting that the politician in question wasn’t Willie Brown.

In an angry phone call to a New York Times reporter as he landed several hours away from his planned rally in Bozeman, Mont., because of a mechanical issue on his plane, Mr. Trump excoriated The Times for its coverage of his meandering news conference on Thursday at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and home, during which he told of an emergency landing during a helicopter trip that he said both he and Mr. Brown had made together.

[snip]

“We have the flight records of the helicopter,” Mr. Trump insisted Friday, saying the helicopter had landed “in a field,” before shouting that he was “probably going to sue” over the Times article.

When asked to produce the flight records, Mr. Trump responded mockingly, repeating the request in a sing-song voice. As of early Friday evening, he had not provided them.

When Maggie and the two NYT journalists who first suggested maybe Trump was confusing Willie Brown with Jerry Brown matched the Politico story, they didn’t mention that Trump’s plane had maintenance issues last night, just like the helicopter 34 years ago. They didn’t mention it, even in spite of Holden’s memory of wondering how Trump could so badly neglect his equipment even after a helicopter crash the year before.

“Anyway,” he continued, “we start flying to Atlantic City. He’s talking about how great things are. And about 15, 20 minutes in, the pilot yells, ‘Shut up! Shut up!’”

The hydraulic system had failed, he said. “Donald turned white as snow,” Mr. Holden recalled. “He was shaking.”

Mr. Holden said that as the helicopter’s crew worked frantically to set the aircraft down safely, his own thoughts ran to a helicopter crash in 1989 that had killed three senior executives of Mr. Trump’s casinos over Forked River, N.J.

“I just thought, how the hell do you let your staff not maintain your aircraft after you just had a crash that killed some of your staff? How could you let this happen again? I thought, if we go down, this is your fault.”

This whole incident could serve as vehicle for commentary about how a billionaire who wants to run the country again can’t even keep his own gear running. It could provide opportunity to remind readers that Trump got elected in 2016 on a promise he’d spend on infrastructure, only to deliver a never-ending series of infrastructure weeks that nevertheless never delivered the promised investments. Heck, that might even provide opportunity to remind readers that  Kamala cast the tie-breaking vote on the American Rescue Plan in 2021, which funded infrastructure projects Republicans now like to claim credit for, and then cast the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which similarly invested in local communities. Tim Walz, too, was able to get infrastructure spending funded.

But that’s not how this started. That’s not why Trump told a story in which he swapped one Black politician with another widely known for being Kamala’s early mentor (apparently Trump told the story in response to a softball about Brown’s role in Kamala’s career).

Trump told this story to create the illusion that he remains close to Willie Brown, so close that Willie badmouths Kamala Harris to Trump. Trump told the story to make a claim that even Kamala’s early mentor now criticizes her.

Whether people have flown with Trump or not, they all deny that trash talking.

Yet that part of the story is getting buried. Holden’s denials appear in paragraph 24 in the Politico story.

Before he hung up with POLITICO, Holden assured a reporter that nobody discussed—let alone criticized—Kamala Harris as Trump claimed Brown did.

“He either mixed it up,” Holden said. “Or, he made it up. This was just too big to overlook. This is a big one. Conflating Willie Brown and me? The press is searching for the real story and they didn’t get it. You did.”

Willie Brown’s denials appear in paragraph 29 in the latest NYT version; Holden’s don’t appear at all.

Reached again Friday night, Mr. Brown reiterated that he had never flown in a helicopter with Mr. Trump and that he had not denigrated Ms. Harris to the former president because he admires and respects her.

“Those are the two things I am certain of,” he said. “All the rest of this is amusing.”

Jerry Brown’s denials appear in paragraph six of the original NYT story.

Jerry Brown, who left office in January 2019, said through a spokesman, “There was no emergency landing and no discussion of Kamala Harris.”

Willie Brown’s appear in paragraph 14.

Reached on his cellphone just after Mr. Trump’s news conference — at his regular lunch spot at Sam’s Grill in downtown San Francisco — Mr. Brown, 90, said the whole story was false. He had never ridden in a helicopter with Mr. Trump, he said. He had never nearly perished in any helicopter ride. And he remained an avid supporter of Ms. Harris’s.

[snip]

Ms. Harris ended their relationship nearly three decades ago, but Mr. Brown said he had always been a big fan and supporter of hers. “No hard feelings,” he said.

Gavin Newsom’s denials appear in paragraph 20.

The subject of Ms. Harris, with whom Mr. Newsom had enjoyed a friendly rivalry, did not come up on the helicopter, he added. “We talked about everyone else, but not Kamala,” he said with a laugh.

This effusive denial from Willie Brown appears in paragraph 8 of the SF Chronicle’s early story reporting the former Mayor’s denials of flying with Trump.

Willie Brown told the Chronicle he did not say anything disparaging to Trump about Harris, whom he dated for about a year in the mid-1990s and appointed to two state commissions years before Harris was elected San Francisco district attorney in 2003.

“It’s just as accurate as all of the other components of what you’re asking me about,” Brown said. “No, not accurate at all.”

So Brown has never said anything bad about Harris to Trump?

“Nooooooo,” Brown said Thursday. “Hell, no.”

Trump told a makebelieve story so that he could lend credence to a claim that even a historic Black politician, the Vice President’s early mentor, doesn’t like Kamala anymore. And after chasing the story for two days, that part of the fabrication is being lost, buried beneath fact checks of who flew with whom.

It was just another lie among many Trump told about Kamala Harris at that presser, lies for which only some outlets are calling him out.

I raise this because of the campaign by a slew of mostly insipid male reporters who — whether goaded by Trump or not — are making the point he wanted them to take away from his presser: that Kamala hasn’t done a presser (because, Trump claims, she’s not smart enough).

Here’s how Maggie, in a piece that never directly called Trump on a single one of his lies about Kamala or polling or his crowds or the economy (it does note his claims that he left office peacefully are false), wrote it up in a piece with Shane Goldmacher and Jonathan Swan.

Former President Donald J. Trump tried on Thursday to shoehorn himself back into a national conversation that Vice President Kamala Harris has dominated for more than two weeks, holding an hourlong news conference in which he assailed Ms. Harris’s intelligence and taunted her for failing to field questions similarly from journalists.

[snip]

The goal of Mr. Trump’s news conference, which he announced on Thursday morning on his social media site, was to highlight that Ms. Harris has yet to hold a news conference of her own or to give an unscripted interview to the news media.

It was a point he made during his event, arguing that she had avoided doing so because “she’s not smart enough.”

Journalists have been running around for days suggesting that some vaunted Fourth Estate is entitled to interviews with and press conferences from Kamala Harris as if they add something, as if they have value to democracy.

And yet the biggest immediate news story that came out of an hour long presser (Trump’s dodges about abortion will have more lasting import), that he fabricated a story about Willie Brown, has not been described as just one of many efforts in the press conference to lie about the Vice President.

Trump gathered a bunch of journalists to get them to accuse Kamala of being too stupid to hold a press conference. And yet there’s no reflection that one of the biggest things he fed journalists was a fabricated story made to prop up all the rest of his lies about Kamala.

Listen on Spotify (transcripts available)

Listen on Apple (transcripts available)

Three quarters of the way through yesterday’s Trump presser, Meghan McCain RTed a clip Aaron Rupar posted and predicted “Vice President Harris is going to win.”

In Rupar’s clip, Trump was, for the second time in an hour, lying about how big his crowds were. Parts of answers taking up six minutes of the 1:04 press conference (marked in blue below) were dedicated to lying about his crowd sizes, and claiming the Vice President’s were smaller — by an order of magnitude — than they actually are.

Over six more minutes (marked in red) — as well as one claim in his opening statement — were lies about how well he’s doing in the polls.

Another six minutes (marked in green) were dedicated to lies about how unfair his own prosecutions are, except the one before the “brilliant” Aileen Cannon, through whose intervention, he “won” his stolen documents case.

For much of the rest, Trump couldn’t decide whether Kamala Harris and Joe Biden were stupid, or they were super smart for managing to steal the 2020 election.

And that’s before Trump confused Black former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown with white former Governor Jerry Brown and then invented a dangerous helicopter trip he shared with one, on which whoever it was badmouthed Kamala, something both Willie and Jerry, along with Gavin Newsom, who was probably on the trip Trump lied about, disavowed. Newsom told the NYT that they had discussed “everyone else.”

The subject of Ms. Harris, with whom Mr. Newsom had enjoyed a friendly rivalry, did not come up on the helicopter, he added. “We talked about everyone else, but not Kamala,” he said with a laugh.

Given the close relationship Newsom’s former spouse, Kimberly Guilfoyle, currently has with Don Jr, that “everyone” may well suggest that Trump confused Kamala with his son’s long-term partner.

It was a shitshow.

And yet, aside from that story busting Trump for confusing Willie and Jerry Brown, outlets like the NYT have largely memory holed what a shit show it was. The press conference itself appeared on neither the dead tree front page nor the digital front page (the very good story on the Willie and Jerry confusion didn’t make it into the paper, nor does it currently appear on my digital front page).

In response to Joe Biden’s similarly awful performance at the debate, the NYT dedicated weeks to demanding he drop out.

Not Trump.

The horse race journalists have rabidly been demanding that Kamala — who has been rather busy of late — give an interview or press conference. They’ve no doubt been goaded into doing so by Trump, because both he and JD have been demanding it too.

But if yesterday is any indication, there is no imaginable value to reporting from most of these horserace journalists. They’re just props in Trump’s reality show in which he attracts the biggest crowds in history.

0:00 to 11:03: Lies about his preference to run against Kamala, lies about polls, lies about Kamala’s role as Border Czar, lies about migration. Lies that people can’t buy bacon. Misreads which debate is on September 10 (NBC rather than ABC). Attacks Kamala as “barely competent.” Lies about prisons being emptied out into the US. Accuses Kamala of being nasty to Biden. Claims “the presidency” was taken away from Biden. Lies that he’s leading. Lies about cherishing the Constitution. Falsely claims that Biden is a very angry man. Attacks Pelosi as crazy. Lies that Kamala was “appointed to head the border.” Cites Project 2025 source Tom Holman.

11:03 to 13:18: Explains that he hasn’t recalibrated strategy at all. Claims Kamala destroyed San Francisco and California. Claims Bob Tisch, who is dead, would hate what San Francisco has become. Claims Kamala is weak on crime but then claims “they” weaponized law enforcement against him. Lies that he “won” the documents case and complains that nobody wrote about it. Calls Aileen Cannon brilliant. Claims that Biden lost his documents case because he didn’t have Presidential immunity and Presidential Records Act, neither of which relate to why Cannon dismissed the case. States that Kamala could not pass her bar exam.

13:18 to 14:53: Claims he’s getting other voters (this appears to be a question about how Kamala’s entry in the race affects his support).

14:53 to 15:45: Claims Josh Shapiro is a terrible guy. Lies that Kamala was worse than any of her VP candidates.

15:45 to 16:13: Follows up on debates and states that CBS will do a VP debate. Claims JD Vance is doing a fantastic job.

16:13 to 20:18: Starts by scoffing, “give me a break.” Lies about crowd sizes. Claims Kamala had only 2,000 people on Wednesday. Lies about crowd size some more. Claims his crowds are 30 times bigger. Claims he’s happy the reporter asked the question. Claims Republicans, and he as the candidate, have the enthusiasm. Claims that if all cars were electric, you would have to rebuild every bridge in the US. Claims he has had the biggest crowds in history. Lies that he has hundreds of thousands at his rallies.

20:18 to 21:49: Claims he got Brian Kemp elected, but doesn’t know whether they can repair their differences. Lies that he’s leading in GA by a lot and PA by a lot. Complains that Kemp doesn’t like him even though he got him elected. Claims that given his margins in AL and SC, it’s impossible he lost GA. Lies that all he wants is honest elections.

21:49 to 22:38: Claims that Biden didn’t say Trump wouldn’t allow the peaceful transfer of power if he loses. Claims Biden doesn’t know what he said. Claims Biden should have brought this up at the debate.

22:38 to 24:26: Complains, “what a stupid question.” Makes excuses for why he’s not campaigning. Lies that he’s leading by a lot. Claims Kamala is not smart enough to do a press conference. Claims Russia, China, and North Korea don’t respect us anymore. Describes going to Montana (he first says it’s Wyoming) to help Tim Sheehy win the Senate race.

24:26 to 25:18: Trump applauds Elon Musk for endorsing him. Claims a lot of people are talking about the show.

25:18 to 26:06: [Possibly a follow-up on Xitter] Trump assures he’ll great along great with Xi Jinpeng. Describes there used to be a sofa where he has made journalists stand up. Claims China was taking advantage of the US.

26:06 to 28:17: [a question from Maggie Haberman] Claims people aren’t talking about January 6 and January 6 defendants were treated unfairly. Claims they weren’t there through him. Claims January 6 was the biggest crowd he’s ever spoken to. Claims it’s hard to find a picture of the crowd, and lies there were pictures of the “very small number of people” who went to the Capitol. Lies that he spoke in the same place that MLK Jr spoke and his crowd was bigger. 

28:17 to 30:11: Implies that Kamala’s pick as the nominee violates the Constitution. Repeats his claims about Biden being forced out of the race. Calls her “the first loser” again (referring to her dropping out of the 2020 race first). Asserts that Biden regrets picking Kamala and claims she turned on Biden.

30:11 to 30:46: Asserts that Hillary was far superior, in terms of intelligence, than anyone else he has run against. States that Hillary was her own worst enemy.

30:46 to 34:59: After instructing yet another journalist to speak up, points out how big the room is, then asserts Mar-a-Lago is worth $18 million (a misrepresentation of what Judge Engoron has ruled). Lies that the abortion issue is “tampered down.” Lies that “they” wanted to bring abortion back to the states, “and I did that.” Claims 82% of Republicans do believe in exceptions. Claims that abortion will be a very small issue in the election. Lies that Democrats do abortions after birth, claiming that Walz supports that. Then raises Glenn Youngkin (seemingly confusing VA and MN). Calls Walz and Kamala “progressive,” then claims no one knows what it means. Repeats that abortion is not a big factor anymore. Repeats again that “that issue” is very much subdued.

34:59 to 37:17: Claims you can’t take away guns, they need weapons for protection, entertainment, and hunting. Suggests that Chicago’s shooting rates are due to its tough gun laws. Claims Afghanistan doesn’t have shooting problems. Calls Afghanistan the worst embarrassment to the history of the country. Calls Milley incompetent. Claims DOD “took out the soldiers first.” Claims the Afghans who fell off a transport plane fell from a height three times higher than the World Trade Center.

37:17 to 38:56: Lies that Ka-Mala [which he pronounced correctly earlier in the press conference] is not in favor of giving Israel weapons. Lies that Kamala has been very very bad to both Israel and Jewish people. Mispronounces Ka-Mala again, and claims that Jews who vote for her should have their head examined. Claims he gave “them” Golan Heights and the Capitol of Israel, Jerusalem, built the embassy, gave them no Iran deal. Claims he would have had a deal one week after the 2020 election. Claims he hit Iran a couple times. Returns to what he gave Israel, the Abraham Accords. Repeats that any Jewish person who votes for Ka-Mala and her new friend ought to have your head examined.

38:51 to 39:09: States that the FBI has done a very good job with the investigation into Thomas Crooks and “this other lunatic they have in custody” (probably a reference to Asif Merchant).

39:09 to 40:02: Claims to know Willie Brown very well (he’s confusing Willie Brown with Jerry Brown, and even still inventing a close call). Invents a false story about almost dying in a helicopter with him. Lied that Willie Brown told him terrible things about Kamala. Claims Willie Brown had a big part in what happened with Ka-Mala. Lies that Willie Brown was not a fan of Kamala at that point.

40:02 to 40:40: [I missed one single answer question here.] Defers telling what his vote on the abortion referendum will be. Claims he’ll hold a press conference to announce how he’ll vote. Predicts it’ll go in a more “liberal” way than people expect.

40:40 to 42:38: Asserts his tax cuts were the biggest in history and included generous support for childcare. States the tax cuts “are coming due.” Lies that not renewing them creates a four times tax increase. Lies that Democrats would offer no security. Repeats “transgender” several times. Repeats his plan to eliminate taxes on Social Security and tips.

42:38 to 44:10: Agrees that Steve Bannon’s prosecution was politically motivated. Claims again “they” have weaponized government against him. Lies that Biden’s DOJ was behind the NY cases. Attacks mail-in ballots.

44:10 to 45:01: Makes excuses for Elon Musk.

45:01 to 47:20: Lies that there are polls that show he’ll win in a landslide. Exaggerates inflation. Claims people are paying $5 to $7 to pay for gas. Claims the Strategic Reserve has never been this low. Claims oil will soon be at $100 a barrel. Mispronounces Ka-Mala again and repeats his claim that she’s not as smart as Biden.

47:20 to 47:50: Dodges a question about mifepristone. Repeats that you have to give a vote on abortion.

47:50 to 48:09: Claims Kamala is not as smart as Biden again.

48:09 to 49:01: Observes that Kamala is a woman and “represents certain groups of people.” Lies that Kamala is going way down in the polls. Calls Gavin Newsom, “Gavin New-Scum.” Repeats her claim that Kamala destroyed California. Compares her to prosecutors who’ve prosecuted him.

49:01 to 49:50: After asking four different journalists to help him hear what a journalist asked, mocks the idea of doing a daily press briefing. Promises total access. Promises more access than you want.

49:50 to 52:33: Lies about his encouragement of “Lock her up” chants and his efforts to prosecute her. Attacks her for a claimed non-response to a subpoena. Claims he thought it was bad to consider putting Hillary in jail. Attacks Hillary for being “pretty evil.” Lies that the MAGA base is 75% of the country. Describes that China and Russia are natural allies but they have combined, along with Iran.

52:33 to 54:50: Claims he wants the election to be about policy. Accuses Kamala of being incompetent. Claims Kamala can’t do better than Biden. Jokes that Biden was never the brightest bulb in the ceiling. Claims Kamala wants to defund the police. Repeats his claim that guns are about self-protection.

54:50 to 56:21: Claims that if he loses there will be a Depression. Lies about his the debt incurred in his administration. Claims he had the perfect number on inflation. Notes they sell hats and claims that proves he’s been right about everything.

56:21 to 58:12: [A second Maggie question.] Claims there was a process behind his pardons. Describes that some of the people he pardoned were harshly treated. Repeats again that “for the most part” his pardons went through his pardon commission. Claims that he let out a lot of low income people who weren’t backed by insiders. Claims that, “for the most part,” he didn’t pardon people involved in killings.

58:12 to 59:15: States that the Federal Reserve gets things wrong a lot. Claims Jerome Powell works on gut feeling. Claims they get along fine. Asserts that the President should have a say in rates cuts. Asserts he has better instincts than Powell.

59:15 to 59:51: Addresses cannabis legalization.

59:21 to 60:42: Directs a reporter to ask Kamala something about her race. Notes that he once supported her. Claims Kamala is being disrespectful regarding her identity.

60:42 to 61:18:  States that he’s pretty much recovered from the wound to his ear. Asserts he’s a fast healer. Shows where the injury was, misdescribes it as the “lobe” of his ear. Points to his scar on the top of his ear.

61:18 to 62:31: Promises the largest mass deportation in the history of the country. Claims local police “know everything about the people.” After claiming that both Biden and Kamala are stupid repeatedly, Trump asserts they’re not stupid because anyone who (he claims) can cheat in elections like they do is not stupid. Lies that Democrats are trying to get immigrants to vote.

62:31 to 63:46: Disclaims any plans to dismantle Social Security. Promises to eliminate taxes on Social Security and tips again.

63:46 to 64:32: Attacks sanctuary cities. Boasts about property in California. Lies that the country has become a crime-ridden mess.