Quoted Text

How did President-elect Trump handle press conference? Nailed it
By Timothy Stanley
Updated 2:49 AM ET, Thu January 12, 2017

Tim Stanley: Journalists may not like the bullying, but many partisans distrustful of press will be fine with it

And while the media will complain that he tried to silence individual reporters -- which he did -- the reality is that the conference was about as raw and detailed as you're likely to get from a president-elect.

He gave us a dozen headlines from just one encounter. This is the Trump paradox: Trump and the press hate each other yet they feed off each other.


We actually learned a lot. Trump's two legislative priorities are building the wall and repealing and replacing Obamacare. What he'll replace Obamacare with remains a mystery -- but at least we know what's coming. Trump also said that he'll name his Supreme Court nominee within two weeks of his inauguration.

In addition, he compared the behavior of some within the intelligence community to Nazis and suggested that the very mention of Senator Lindsey Graham makes him laugh. He even pledged to sack his sons should they underperform while running his businesses. And, perhaps most importantly of all, he signaled that no amount of speculation on his relationship with Vladimir Putin will shift his position towards Russia. Russia was probably guilty of hacking, he concluded, but that will cease once Trump is in charge.

This was presumably not the press conference that he wanted to give. The night before, Buzzfeed published some unverified, lurid claims about Trump's time in Russia that have clearly got under his skin. For some unclear reason he has decided that CNN -- which did not publish allegations that it could not independently verify -- is also guilty of trying to undermine him, and he shouted down questions from CNN's Jim Acosta.

It was unfair, bullying behavior. But calling out the press is not entirely unheard of. Obama scolded reporters for doing things he didn't approve of; Nixon obsessed about the hostile liberal press. What's different about Trump is how happy he is to personalize his battles, to roll up his sleeves and jump into the fight while on live TV.

Un-presidential? Yes. Unpopular? I suspect not. The media has to accept that popular attitudes towards journalism have shifted according to partisan bias, and there are a lot of conservatives nowadays who disbelieve unfavorable reporting of Trump simply because they don't trust its source.

In their opinion, conservatives have been losing since George W. Bush because they've been too nice -- and Trump's aggressive approach is not only entertaining but necessary. Independent voters, meanwhile, might appreciate the way that Trump cuts through gossip to the heart of the matter. Does anyone really believe what Buzzfeed published about Trump? No. Do they want friendlier relations with Russia with an eye to allying against Islamist terrorists? Yes.

It's noticeable that whenever Trump hasn't got an answer for a difficult question, he'll say that the public doesn't care about it. And on everything from his business contacts in Russia to his taxes, he's probably correct enough about this assessment to get away with the deflection. In other words, I can see this style of press conference getting him out of trouble more than it lands him in it.

What a stylistic contrast from Obama. On Tuesday night, Obama rounded off his presidency with a typically professorial speech that told us what we've all been getting wrong and what we need to do to make things better. A moral lecture, in other words. Trump, by contrast, just gets down to business. It's frequently disingenuous and often ugly -- but it's compelling.

Quoted from joebxr

It was a glimpse into the narrow one-sided world we are about to enter into!
Welcome to Trumpmerica!

Quoted from BuckStrider

You mean the world where the media gets called out for trying to pass off 'fake news'?

Are you 'triggered' joebxr because Trump called CNN 'fake news' and Buzzfeed 'a steaming pile of garbage'?

Quoted Text

Sen. John McCain said he did 'what any citizen would do' in turning over the dirty dossier, which contained unconfirmed secrets about the president-elect, over to the FBI.

The Guardian charted the path of how the dossier came to be and how it was that McCain got his hands on the controversial documents.

The story of the dossier began with an investigative firm in Washington, D.C., being tapped by one of Trump's primary allies to dig up some opposition research on the Republican hopeful.

n turn, that firm outsourced the research to a 'retired western European former counter-intelligence official, with a long history of dealing with the shadow world of Moscow's spooks and siloviki (securocrats),' explained the Guardian.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal identified the ex-spy as Christopher Steele.  

By the time the contractor had started digging, Trump's primary opponent had dropped out. But the firm found a Democrat who wanted dirt on the now Republican nominee instead.

The Guardian pointed out that just because a Democrat was willing to pay for the information that didn't mean that said Democrat was Hillary Clinton's campaign or the Democratic National Committee.

Sometimes donors seek out this information in order to ensure they've made a sound investment.

The contractor, who the Guardian didn't name, but the Wall Street Journal identified as Steele, reportedly found the information that he dug up to be concerning. He and another ex-British diplomat, Christopher Burrows, run their own company, Orbis Business Intelligence.

'If the allegations were real, their implications were overwhelming,' the Guardian wrote.  

So over the summer he delivered the intelligence he had gathered from his Russian sources, living within the country and also in the west, to former colleagues in the FBI.

The Guardian suggested he also delivered the documents to his country's own intelligence service.  

As fall approached, and he heard nothing about any FBI investigation into the documents, he was persuaded to tell journalist David Corn, of Mother Jones, of their existence.

The veteran reporter wrote about the dossier on October 31.

The intelligence agent, the Guardian reported, was worried about an FBI cover-up, as the bureau seemed to be spending most of its time and energy on an investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server.  

It wasn't until mid-November, and after the presidential election, that the chips fell in place for the dossier to make its more public way to Washington.

On November 18, at the Halifax International Security Forum, McCain was introduced to a 'former senior western diplomat' who had set eyes on the documents and knew who put them together, telling the Arizona Republican that the individual was 'highly reliable.'

That man can now be named as Sir Andrew Wood, British ambassador to Moscow from 1995 to 2000.

Wood told the Independent that he had met McCain, spoken to him about Trump, and about the potential for him to be compromised.

In a carefully nuanced statement he said: 'Yes I did meet Senator McCain and his aides at the conference.

'We spoke about the kind of activities the Russians can be engaged in.

'We also spoke about how Mr Trump may find himself in a position where there could be an attempt to blackmail him with Kompromat [a Russian term for compromising material] and claims that there were audio and video tapes in existence.'

He added: 'I would like to stress that I did not pass on any dossier to Senator McCain or anyone else and I did not see a dossier at the time. I do know Christopher Steele and in my view he is very professional and thorough in what he does.'

He did not however address whether he told McCain there was a dossier - and how to get it.

Clearly, somebody did.  

From there, McCain dispatched a 'trusted emissary' who flew across the Atlantic to meet the source of the documents at an airport that the Guardian did not name.

The aide was instructed to look for a man with a copy of the Financial Times  and that's how the individuals met, with the source taking McCain's emissary back to his house and giving the American a copy of the documents.

Within 24 hours, the dossier was in Washington, though the contents of the file couldn't be verified without an investigation.

McCain, the Guardian said, was worried that his actions might be interpreted as revenge for some of the controversial comments Trump made about him – such as knocking the fact that the longtime senator had been a prisoner of war.

However, McCain decided to hand over the documents to FBI Director James Comey on December 9.  

'Upon examination of the contents, and unable to make a judgment about their accuracy, I delivered the information to the Director of the FBI,' McCain said Wednesday in a statement about that matter.

'That has been the extent of my contact with the FBI or any other government agency regarding this issue,' McCain said.