Smear Merchants: Remember Praha?

G20 Argentina: Rifts laid bare as world leaders meet BBC
Questions We Should Be Asking About Facebook’s Smear Campaign Against Its Critics - EFF: “The New York Times published a blockbuster story about Facebook that exposed how the company used  so-called “smear merchants” to attack organizations critical of the platform. The story was shocking on a number of levels, revealing that Facebook’s hired guns stooped to dog-whistling, anti-Semitic attacks aimed at George Soros 1 and writing stories blasting Facebook’s competitors on a news site they managed. As Techdirt points out, however, while the particulars are different, the basic slimy tactics are familiar. Any organization that runs public campaigns in opposition to large, moneyed corporate interests has seen some version of this “slime your enemies” playbook. What is different here is that Facebook, the company seeking to undermine its critics, has a powerful role in shaping whether and how news and information is presented to billions of people around the world. Facebook controls the hidden algorithms and other systems that decide what comes up in Instagram and Facebook experiences. And it does so in a way that is almost completely beyond our view, much less our control. This fact—that Facebook can secretly influence what we see (like, perhaps, criticism against it), both through what it promotes and what it allows to be posted by others—is deeply disturbing. Users deserve some answers from Facebook to these basic questions:

• We know that Facebook had staffers embedded in the Donald Trump presidential campaign to help the organization best craft and target its messages. What did Facebook do regarding attacks on its critics detailed in the Times story? Did it use its power to ensure a wide or specifically-targeted distribution of this smear campaign? Did Facebook use its control over how Facebook works to help aim the smears at people who would be most receptive to them? To key policymakers or their staff? If so, how?
• Did Facebook help develop different versions of the smear campaign to appeal to different audiences, as the Russians have done? If so, we should see all of them.
• What is the boundary between what Facebook’s policy teams wish to tell the public and how users experience Facebook and Instagram? Is there a firewall and how is it policed?..”

Deleted emails between EL and BM filled with missinformations ... May truth prevail The Guardian: “Online resource picked the word over ‘disinformation’ where other dictionaries had opted for ‘toxic’ and ‘single-use.’ “Misinformation”, as opposed to disinformation, is Dictionary.com’s word of the year. It followed “toxic”, picked for the same honor by Oxford Dictionaries, and “single-use”, picked by Collins. Jane Solomon, a linguist-in-residence at Dictionary.com, said the choice of “mis” over “dis” was deliberate, intended to serve as a “call to action” to be vigilant in the battle against fake news, flat earthers and anti-vaxxers, among other conduits. The Oakland-based company wanted to highlight the idea of intent to mislead, and that misinformation can be spread unwittingly.

New DOJ Policies for Prosecution of Entities and the Individuals Within Them Most Responsible

Consider the ramifications of this article, via The Atlantic – The idea that the putative transparency group served as a connection between Moscow and the president’s associates is starting to become clearer – if it is an accurate appraisal of an expanding exposure of corruption and malfeasance perpetrated by public and private citizens and groups around the world.  “Barely two years later, the idea of WikiLeaks serving as a medium for Russia to boost the Trump campaign seems more and more plausible—even likely. For some time, there has been substantial evidence of Russia’s involvement in attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election and to hurt the Democrat Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid, from an elaborate trolling and Astroturfing operation to simple theft of emails and hacking. Until recently, the connection between those Russian efforts and Trump allies has remained somewhat obscure and speculative. But recent developments have started to flesh out the picture. Russia used WikiLeaks as a conduit—witting or unwitting—and WikiLeaks, in turn, appears to have been in touch with Trump allies. The key remaining questions are what WikiLeaks knew and what Trump himself knew.

JERSEY, MAN: Atlantic City mayor, councilman filmed brawling outside casino.
(Yes, they’re both Democrats, in case you’re wondering: Atlantic City Democrats denounce mayor, councilman after casino nightclub fight.)

BYRON YORK: Remember Prague? In Michael Cohen plea deal, Mueller says nothing about key collusion allegation.

When news broke that Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about his 2016 meetings concerning the failed Trump Tower Moscow project, the chattering class instantly began talking about the failed Trump Tower Moscow project.
Of course that was news. But it turns out the Cohen plea agreement also made news in what it did not cover. Specifically, it spoke volumes — without saying a word — about a key allegation of the Trump dossier, the charge that Cohen traveled to Prague to arrange secret payments to Russian hackers attacking the Clinton campaign. The accusation is the heart of the collusion allegation, and Trump-Russia special counsel Robert Mueller’s deal with Cohen strongly suggests that prosecutors have not found evidence to support it. . . .
This is why Cohen’s Trump Tower Moscow plea agreement with Mueller is important for the dossier: The plea shows that Mueller closely scrutinized everything Cohen told Congress. And it has long been clear that Mueller and his team are not shy about charging Trump-Russia figures with making false statements. It’s also clear that Mueller found evidence that specific assertions in Cohen’s statements to Congress were false — the ones concerning Trump Tower Moscow — and that he charged Cohen with lying. So if Mueller had evidence that Cohen’s definitive denial of the Prague story, in the same document, was false, it seems reasonable to conclude that Mueller would have charged Cohen for it. Yet in the charges against Cohen, Mueller said absolutely nothing about Prague.

Last April, McClatchy published a blockbuster story with the headline “Sources: Mueller has evidence Cohen was in Prague in 2016, confirming part of dossier.” The story was the subject of a lot of talk among Resistance types. But one notable thing about the McClatchy scoop was that other news organizations never duplicated it, as is common when one outlet breaks a big story. Now Mueller, with vastly more resources and investigative power than any news organization, hasn’t either.
For more than a year, a number of Trump-Russia investigators on Capitol Hill have maintained that none of the dossier’s substantive allegations are true. The new plea deal between Cohen and Mueller is more evidence to support that.

But the dossier’s only purpose was to get a special counsel appointed to go after Trump, and they got that.
For those interested in going deeper regarding special counsels and lying to Congress, I recommend Peter W. Morgan’s The Undefined Crime of Lying to Congress: Ethics Reform and the Rule of Law, 86 Northwestern U. L. Rev. 177 (1992). And here’s a New Yorker piece by Jeffrey Rosen. Excerpt: “Perjury traps have become a popular tactic among independent counsels: if they can’t prove the alleged crime they were appointed to investigate, they indict suspects for lying to investigators. But the traps are effective only because independent counsels have succeeded over the past few decades in expanding the lying laws far beyond their historical roots.”