Let me tell you a story about an ultrasecretive donor, a key architect of the Supreme Court's rightward lurch, and a whole lot of money.
$1.6 billion. With a B.
We & went deep on it.
Let's talk about how massive this dark-money deal is.
It's 🧵time
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Andy Kroll
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PROPUBLICA reporter.
Author of A DEATH ON W STREET, about Seth Rich, conspiracy culture, and Fox News: bit.ly/DeathOnW
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NEW: Rep. Will Hurd — a ***Texas Republican*** — tells that 's border crisis is a "myth."
Hurd says Trump's "wall" is the "most expensive and least effective way to do border security." MORE:
SCOOP:
Biden has told Schumer & Pelosi that he's prepared to pressure moderate Dems to change the filibuster in order to pass a new voting-rights law.
“Chuck, you tell me when you need me to start making phone calls,” Biden said, per a source.
Read:
He's got 10,000 volunteers (and counting)
He raised $10 million this summer
He's outpolling Beto, Booker, and Klobuchar
How far can actually go?
NEW: Inside the making of Yang 2.0
“We lost his body the first time," Seth Rich's mother, Mary, has said, "and the second time we lost his soul.”
How Fox News turned a private tragedy into a "living nightmare" and a global conspiracy theory.
My NEW six-month investigation:
As someone who reported extensively on Fox News's high-profile settlement with Seth Rich's parents, I wanted to share a few observations about today's news.
The $787 million sum is massive.
This is a huge win for Dominion Voting Systems.
A win for truth? Not so much...
🧵
NEW: Elizabeth Warren wants to cancel student-loan debt for 42 million Americans — and make all public colleges and universities tuition-free.
Read about Warren's new higher-ed plan at :
Today we heard Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman tell the about the threats they faced as Georgia election workers in 2020.
Threats fueled by no less than former President Trump himself.
There's an intriguing backstory to their testimony.
A Jan. 6 🧵...
I asked WikiLeaks and Fox News if they planned to correct the record, retract old statements, or apologize after the Mueller Report debunked the Seth Rich conspiracy theories.
Their reply: Silence.
. raised nearly $1.1 in the days after the 2nd DNC debate — most of it from new, small-donor dollars, his campaign tells
🚨 I’ve got a juicy story to tell you about Leonard Leo.
Last time we checked in with Leo, we revealed details about a $1.6 BILLION gift he'd received.
That huge donation begged the question:
What will Leo do next?
Answer: “Crush liberal dominance.”
How?
It's 🧵 time
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I asked to reflect on the 2020 campaign so far.
“There is the sense that Democrats are painting [Trump] as the cause of all the problems, & many Americans are just fed up because there’s more of a focus on Trump than on their towns & cities.”
Tom Clare, lawyer for Dominion Voting Systems, tells reporters just now that Dominion's $1.3 billion suit against Sidney Powell "is the first in a series of legal steps Dominion will be taking. But the process of setting the record straight starts today with" Powell suit.
This is straight 🔥from , who calls out the parade of generals who love to say the U.S. has just "turned the corner" in its Middle East wars:
"We've turned the corner so many times we're going in circles in these regions."
So the Trump campaign's "bombshell" is a dud.
I can show you cold hard evidence that Trump pocketed $15.8 million w/in weeks of taking office from a Chinese-American exec who peddled access to Chinese elites and w/ ties to Chinese military intelligence. motherjones.com/politics/2017/
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"The venture—set up in 2017 after Biden left the vice presidency and before his presidential campaign—never received proposed funds from the Chinese company or completed any deals...Corporate records reviewed by The WSJ show no role for Joe Biden." wsj.com/articles/hunte
NEW: Emails and text messages show senior GOP officials and Trump legal advisers with their fingerprints all over Arizona's phony "audit."
We're talking Reince Priebus, Rudy Giuliani, and others with direct ties to Trump and the RNC.
Read my latest:
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19/ I promise you this:
and aren’t done reporting on Barre Seid, Leonard Leo, and dark money.
We want to hear from you.
Do you know Seid or Leo?
Want to leak docs to us?
Contact me👇
Andy.Kroll (at) ProPublica (dot) org
Signal/text: 202-215-6203
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18/ Marble Freedom Trust's $1.6B gift also raises big questions about dark $$$.
Should the tax code allow megadonors—liberal, conservative, whatever—to dodge hundreds of millions in taxes by giving to dark-money groups?
Should there be more disclosure?
thinks so
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2/ Start w/ that $1.6B, which & broke the news of.
It’s nearly the GDP of Belize.
It's more than the DNC & RNC's COMBINED spending in '20.
At first, I couldn’t think of a donation remotely close to it.
So we started to dig…
US professor has just filed a legal claim against Cambridge Analytica over its use of his personal data. Read Carroll's claim: documentcloud.org/documents/4413 Background:
I'm late to watching this (just did), but Yang's was one of the more impressive closing statements I've heard at any of the presidential debates this year.
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I’m not running for president because I fantasized about being president; I’m running for president because, like many of you here . . . I’m a parent & a patriot and I have seen the future that we are leaving for our kids & it is not something I am willing to accept. #DemDebate
The U.S. Justice Department has charged Republican fundraiser Elliott Broidy with criminal conspiracy for acting as foreign agents and failing to register as required by law.
Read the DOJ's charging document: courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco
"The venture—set up in 2017 after Biden left the vice presidency and before his presidential campaign—never received proposed funds from the Chinese company or completed any deals...Corporate records reviewed by The WSJ show no role for Joe Biden." wsj.com/articles/hunte
Can you keep a straight face while uttering the sentence: “He asked for an investigation of Vice President Biden because he was investigating corruption”?
If so, then YOU TOO can be a United States Senator in the Republican Party
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20/end You should read—and ideally subscribe to—, which publishes hard-hitting reporting on the left and the right, no fear, no favor.
And please read the whole Seid/Leo story here, by me, , and :
Ignore the stories saying the 1st impeachment hearing "lacked pizzazz." What matters:
Trump told his EU ambassador he cared more about damaging a political rival than helping an ally
Trump's smear campaign twd Biden risked Ukrainian AND US nat'l security
NEW: The parents of Seth Rich, the slain DNC staffer, are suing , Fox reporter Malia Zimmerman, and Fox contributor Ed Butowsky in the Southern District of New York. They're seeking a jury trial. More to come shortly...
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3/ Our team—, , , and me—pored over tax docs and campaign filings.
Donations to orgs affiliated w/ George Soros & the Kochs came close, but no one matched that $1.6B.
This is the *largest known political donation in US history.*
And yet...
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4/ Marble Freedom Trust, the group that received the $1.6B windfall, was shrouded in secrecy for more than TWO YEARS.
How was this possible?
When we set out to answer that question, we focused on the two men at the center of this opaque deal:
Barre Seid (below) & Leonard Leo…
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15/ Leo built the Federalist Society into a massive pipeline for conservative lawyers, academics, and politicians.
He helped put FIVE of the 6 conservative justices on today’s Supreme Court.
Justice Thomas once joked Leo was “the no. 3 most powerful person in the world.”
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SCOOP: Documents obtained by show a series of hacking attempts—including a successful spear-phishing message—that targeted a Democrat who challenged pro-Russia Rep. Dana Rohrabacher. The FBI has investigated.
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Dominion’s lawyer Tom Clare: “There will certainly be others. There are other individuals who have spoken the big lie and have put forward these defamatory statements about Dominion, but then there are also players in the media that have amplified it.”
NEW: I obtained the full list of coal barons, defense lobbyists, and pharma execs who, three years ago at Trump Tower, planted the seeds for 's war on regulations.
This is the story of Trump's "shadow cabinet" — and the people on it
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7/ Seid has poured money into right-wing causes.
For instance, the Heartland Institute, a hardcore climate-skeptic group known, got Seid donations.
Heartland, you might recall, briefly ran a billboard linking climate science to ... the Unabomber.
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5/ Let’s start with Barre Seid.
Never heard of him? He prefers it that way.
He’s a wealthy 90-year-old electronics magnate, born and raised in Chicago.
He's so obscure, this is one of the few known photos of him—as a 14-year-old in 1946...
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Here's the truly disappointing part:
Per & others, Fox News will not take corrective action ON-AIR for its mistakes.
Fox hosts won't be reading apologies or corrections.
That's a huge loss for truth — and a setback in the fight against misinformation... 7/x
In 2016, Broidy was one of four National Deputy Finance Chairmen for the RNC and Trump campaign.
The other three finance chairmen?
Michael Cohen
Steve Wynn
Louis DeJoy
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The U.S. Justice Department has charged Republican fundraiser Elliott Broidy with criminal conspiracy for acting as foreign agents and failing to register as required by law.
Read the DOJ's charging document: courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco
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So why do I mention these two lawyers?
For nearly six years, Gottlieb & Governski have been developing a playbook for how the law can combat viral conspiracy theories and defend victims.
Stop the Steal 1.0?✅
Pizzagate?✅
Seth Rich's brother?✅
6/
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8/ George Mason University, a hotbed of conservative and libertarian thinking/research on the law and economics, has raked in lots of Seid money.
He is also believed to be the funder of a 2008 anti-Islam film widely criticized as virulently anti-Muslim…
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Post-script: If you want to read more about these lawyers' work on behalf of Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman partnering with , there's a wealth of information here:
Bannon, hours before the mob swarmed the Capitol: "The question you have to ask yourself, have you pushed yourself as far as you possibly have pushed?"
Giuliani: "So let's have trial by combat"
Trump: "If you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore..."
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12/ By making Marble Freedom Trust a 501c4 nonprofit, Seid and Leo got the best of both worlds.
Seid could potentially avoid up to $400M in taxes on the sale of his company.
Leo & Marble Freedom Trust got *that much more* money to spend…
But on what?
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Moss and Freeman became just the latest private citizens to become victims of viral, harmful conspiracy theories related to politics and elections.
So, what could they do to clear their names?
They sued , Rudy Giuliani, and several others. 4/ protectdemocracy.org/resource-libra
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6/ Barre Seid doesn’t like talking to reporters. (Trust me, we tried.)
He donates to charities, but you won’t see his name emblazoned on theaters or colleges like Koch or Bloomberg.
We found some confusion over how to pronounce his last name. (It’s “side.”)
Yet for decades…
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14/ Leo has been called Trump’s “Supreme Court whisperer.”
In truth, that understates Leo’s clout.
He may be one of — if not THE — most influential political activists of the last 20 or 30 years.
Here’s why…
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11/ By making Marble Freedom Trust a legal trust, Leo didn’t have to file *any* paperwork with state regulators.
No one would need to know MFT existed apart from Leo and his team.
What's more, the group still doesn't show up when you search the IRS's database...
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16/ Key to Leo’s success is his ability to raise money and funnel that $$ through dark-money nonprofits.
From 2005 to mid-2021, Leo and his allies raised at least $460M (NOT incl. Marble Freedom Trust).
They spent it on SCOTUS confirmation fights, overturning Roe, and more.
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For years I've followed Gottlieb and Governski's work — and the work of the lawyers they team up with — as part of my book reporting about the Seth Rich saga.
They're on the leading edge of this work. And they've gotten results time and again. 7/
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9/ The roots of Barre Seid’s relationship with Leonard Leo are murky (we’re working on that).
But by 2015 or so, it’s clear Seid and Leo are quite close, according to emails and other reporting of ours.
See, for instance, this key moment in our story:
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“Of all times to abandon the Court’s duty to declare the law, this was not the one."
The 6 most brutal lines from Justice Kagan’s fiery gerrymandering dissent
“It was like an internal Ponzi scheme”: What Republican insiders were saying about Cambridge Analytica long before its latest scandals.
My NEW story ==> bit.ly/2G7TOzX
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10/ CLEARLY, by 2020 and 2021, Seid and Leo were so close that Seid decided to donate 100% of his electronics company, Tripp Lite, to Leo’s Marble Freedom Trust.
Seid even made Leo an officer of his company.
The structure of this deal is a key detail...
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Tom Clare seems to suggest — but only suggest — that media companies who amplified the conspiracy theories about Dominion spread by Sidney Powell could face future legal action.
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What's infuriating is the absence of any contrition, apology, or remediation by Fox, especially .
As I've reported, Hannity arguably did more than anyone else to amplify the baseless, discredited, and cruel conspiracy theories about Seth. 2/x
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13/ To be clear, we talked to tax wonks, law professors, trust lawyers, dozens of experts in all.
They said this transaction appears to be legal.
Now, the activist at the center of it all, Leonard Leo…
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What's most frustrating — it's downright infuriating — about this outcome is how little accountability it demands from Fox News.
Fox's official statement — again, almost certainly agreed to by all sides — is a tutorial in spin.
Here is the full statement:
5/x
“It’s painful and crazy,” former Clinton campaign chair John Podesta says about being the victim of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory.
“I’m pretty grizzled. One big difference is you’ve got somebody sitting in the Oval Office stoking the conspiracy."
Remember what Sarah Huckabee Sanders told the media that the White House had heard from "countless" FBI agents saying they'd lost confidence in Comey?
Mueller report: "Sanders acknowledged to investigators that her comments were not founded on anything."
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17/ Now, thanks to Seid, Leo has nearly 4x the amount he raised over 16 yrs at his disposal and ambitions to match.
His new political war chest will likely supercharge efforts to further shift US politics to the right.
Leo didn’t respond to us but said this to the :
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Hand it to : The guy's message discipline is impressive. No matter the question — Putin, impeachment, taxes — he always brings it back to his central campaign themes of universal basic income, AI, technological change.
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Tom Clare, Dominion's lawyer, won't rule out suing for pushing Dominion conspiracy theories.
"We have not ruled anyone out. We are looking very deliberately at the actions of everyone who has been involved in talking about Dominion."
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These lawyers would be the first to tell you that today belongs to Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman.
You really should watch their testimony if you haven't: youtube.com/watch?v=xa43_z
However, if you want to know the inside story of how a small band of lawyers fought viral lies... 8/
Make no mistake:
Dominion & its lawyers did a real public service.
They unearthed and publicized emails, text messages, and other documents exposing Fox's inner workings and its shoddy 2020 coverage.
We know ~so much more~ about how Fox works now.
And we have this gem: 8/x
EXCLUSIVE: How a pro-Trump cop undermined the Seth Rich murder investigation — by giving a confidential witness's name to a popular Rich conspiracy theorist.
An explosive excerpt of A DEATH ON W STREET, which comes out today.
Read it at
., a Democratic election lawyer, calls the wave of GOP voter-restriction bills “the most massive voter suppression effort since Jim Crow.”
Will Democrats have the guts to change the filibuster so they can pass HR 1 and protect voting rights?
., in a new statement, says the Senate Ethics Committee "must consider the expulsion, or censure and punishment, of , Sen. , and perhaps others."
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Teneo Network is a “private and confidential” network of young conservatives.
Their goal: to take what the Federalist Society did for judges and lawyers and expand it to:
Wall Street. Silicon Valley. Media. Corporate America. Energy.
A Federalist Society for everything. 3/
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Leo helped run the Federalist Society for 3 decades, building a pipeline for conservative judges & justices.
He was an architect of the 6-3 SCOTUS conservative supermajority that overturned Roe.
His latest project?
It’s called the Teneo Network. 2/
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Teneo Network is just one piece of the puzzle about what Leo is up to now.
But if the Fed. Society’s success is an indication, you could hear a lot more about Teneo soon.
Including from us. So watch this space…
And pls share today’s story!
13/end
"In basically no cases does enforce its anti-harassment policy," tells , "and marginalized people have to deal with the consequences of that."
EXCLUSIVE: Trump personally called a fringe lawmaker in Wisconsin who is trying to decertify the '20 election and "reclaim" WI's 10 electors.
“You’re my kind of guy,” Trump told Rep. Tim Ramthun.
Then Trump offered to endorse him.
My new investigation:
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Until now, Teneo has flown under the radar.
But and obtained more than 50 hours of Teneo videos and 100s of pages of documents.
We interviewed Teneo members.
Here’s what we learned… 4/
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Fox doesn't admit it lied; it "acknowledge[s]" the court's ruling that it made false claims.
Fox spins the settlement as evidence of its "journalistic standards."
And it complains about the "acrimony of a divisive trial" — a line I'm shocked ever saw the light of day. 6/x
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Stephen Shackelford, a lawyer for Susman Godfrey who has joined Dominion's legal team, says Fox endorsed, repeated, and amplified lies about Dominion.
He says Fox "published these false and defamatory statements to make a profit" and to compete with rival networks.
One of Kavanaugh's classmates who removed her name from the statement, Louisa Garry, is the same friend who appears on camera in the Judicial Crisis Network's $1.5 mil ad blitz praising Kavanaugh. twitter.com/RonanFarrow/st
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Here's where we get to the intriguing backstory I mentioned at the start of this thread.
Seated behind Shaye Moss and next to Ruby Freeman at today's hearing were two of their lawyers, Mike Gottlieb & Meryl Governski.
(They're to the left of Ruby in the red.) 5/
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Here is Dominion's 124-page defamation complaint against Sidney Powell if you want to read it: courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco
Los Angeles Times reported about Justice Thomas' gifts 20 years ago. After that he stopped disclosing them.
Until revealed them today:
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But it's hard to see how this result — without real public accountability — changes Fox's behavior.
Without an on-air retraction, correction, or apology, some Fox viewers probably don't know the settlement happened!
This gets at something the Rich family wrestled with... 9/x
NEW: Twitter co-founder is giving $5 million to 's group to build the case for a universal basic income.
Dorsey announced the donation in a new podcast interview with Yang. All the details here: rollingstone.com/politics/polit
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...well, I've got a book for you.
I spent years watching Gottlieb, Governski, and their colleagues figure out how to fight for truth and facts in this truth-challenged era of ours.
It's in my upcoming book. Check it out — and thanks for following along.
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I gotta say, Savannah Guthrie spoke for quite a lot of people with this exchange about Trump's retweeting of insane conspiracy theories:
Trump: "That was a retweet! People can decide for themselves!"
Guthrie: "You're the president, you're not someone's crazy uncle."
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Teneo’s origin story — as told by one of its cofounders — includes another name you’ll recognize:
Peter Thiel, the iconoclastic investor and Trump backer.
Here’s the story Teneo’s former leader tells of how the group got started, with Thiel present at the creation 6/
Yang has now gotten praise from Whoopi Goldberg and Elon Musk. Hard to think of a previous presidential candidate who's landed that duo.
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"Andrew Yang was here and made perfect sense to me," @WhoopiGoldberg tells @BernieSanders on The View.
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Financially, this is a huge win for Dominion and its lawyers. Vacation homes will surely be purchased.
It's not THAT big of a hit for Fox News.
Parent company Fox Corp. reported revenues of $4.61 *billion* ... for the last three mos of 2022.
This is far from existential. 4/x
Rep. Adam Schiff to me: “The situation is so worrying or alarming, it would be easy to be in a panic about it all of the time. But I think to break through the clutter, you have to speak in rational terms or people will just disregard what you have to say”
NEW: Big law firms vowed to review or cut off their donations to the 147 Republicans who voted to overthrow Biden's election.
Less than a year later, Big Law is back to bankrolling the "Sedition Caucus" + its enablers.
The Jan. 6 Accountability beat
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These accusations, echoed by Trump himself, turned Moss and Freeman's lives inside out.
They received racist and violent threats, their careers suffered, and they feared for their safety.
Ruby Freeman had to flee her home for two months, she testified. See below... 3/
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The Rich family's lawyers asked this:
How do you calculate damages and design accountability in a way that helps repair the truth?
Put another way, what would it cost to, say, create and broadcast a media campaign that corrects a viral lie?
Here's what I wrote in my book:
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Teneo Network’s members have included big names in the conservative vanguard:
Senators and Josh
In fact, Hawley cofounded Teneo back in 2008
Rep. , now the 4th-ranked House GOPer
As well as major cultural figures on the right... 5/
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Sanders says using the National Guard is something "that has to be done" in response to #COVIDー19. He pivots from there to stressing how important it is to provide relief for the millions of workers hurt by the economic recession that will likely ensue from the pandemic .
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The videos & obtained are filled w/ fascinating insights into how conservative leaders think.
Consider this scenario, as laid out by Teneo cofounder Evan Baehr, about how “the left” wields its cultural power.
We found this hypothetical revealing 7/
Of course
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Dennis Rodman was either drunk or on drugs (delusional) when he said I wanted to go to North Korea with him. Glad I fired him on Apprentice!
NEW: I spent two months interviewing more than 30 key insiders and activists about how close Democrats got to protecting voting rights and reforming the filibuster — and why they failed.
Key principals are on the record.
Loads of new reporting here.
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Settlement agreements — even 11th-hour ones — usually emerge from many hours of grueling negotiations.
The dollar figure, public remarks, and what the plaintiffs & defendants can — and can't — say afterward is agreed to by all parties.
It's usually quite choreographed. 2/x
1/ I want to break out a few important points about this California hacking scoop of mine for — and what it tells us about what to expect in the 2018 midterms.
.: "Many of the rules you’ve come to accept as normal exist b/c of power plays by predominantly white conservatives seeking to entrench their power to wield a veto over everything the majority of the country wants...it’s up to Dems to change it"
