the DON JONES INDEX…

 

 

 

GAINS POSTED in GREEN

LOSSES POSTED in RED

 

 

 

    12/3/21…    14,623.74 

  11/26/21…    14,540.13 

    6/27/13…    15,000.00

 

(THE DOW JONES INDEX: 12/3/21… 35,870.95; 11/26/21… 35,921.23; 6/27/13… 15,000.00)

 

 

LESSON for December 3, 2021 – LOCK UP the CLOWNS!

 

Broadway said goodbye to Steven Sondheim this week – arguably the premiere composer of the Great White Way (or, at least, a near-equal to Rogers & Hart, Cole Porter… that bunch).  Writing and producing the soundtracks for presentations from “Cats” to “Sweeney Todd” to “A Little Night Music”, he garnered a wheelbarrow full of awards  and accolades, but none, arguably, more fitting than for his masterpiece from the latter: “Send In the Clowns”, which also hit the pop charts in a version by Judy Collins.

Certainly a giant in his field… and a bit of a prophet, unfortunately.  Over the last few years, clowns have been busting out all over like dandelions in April and, as more and more circuses shut down due to Covid and animal rights, the happy, child-friendly funmakers of venues from the Big Top to kiddie birthday parties are getting scarcer and scarcer.  Instead, we have the New Clowns… evil, in some instances, like Steven King’s “Pennywise” in the sewer and his subsequent imitators, or just plain ludicrously incompetent.  We may still laugh, but we shudder when these jokers gain access to real economic or religious or political power, and applaud their removal with gusto, but also with grudging respect for their unique;y merry malevolence.

That other, more high-falutin’ circus, the Congressional Capitol Riot investigatory squadron, has been fingerin’ and slappin’ down clowns almost since the J-six genesis… can it be twenty two months ago, now?  It can, it has been and it still is, and sanity, if not dark comedy, exulted when the posse-probers picked out two more bozos for Federal prosecution – to go with their biggest big shoe and frightwig trophy to date, Steve Bannon.

 

Reuters, on September 24th, reported on the subpoenas served to Bannon, to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows (he of the (“must be democrats”) revelations, Meadows’ Deputy Dan Scavino and Defense Department minion Kash Patel.  In a letter from committee Chairman Bennie Thompson to Steve-O, Thompson noted that he had been involved with multiple conversations about persuading members of Congress to block certification of Trump's election defeat.

"You are quoted as stating, on Jan. 5, 2021, that 'all hell is going to break loose tomorrow,'" Thompson wrote. "Accordingly, the select committee seeks both documents and your deposition testimony."

Bannon was fired by Trump August 2017 but they later mended fences and stayed in contact. Trump pardoned Bannon after he was charged with swindling the president's own supporters over an effort to raise private funds to build a border wall.

 

The other two clown shoes dropped two months later.

 “The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol is charging ahead with subpoenas on some longtime denizens of Trump World: InfoWars head Alex Jones, self-described dirty trickster Roger Stone, and rally promoters Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence,” proclaimed the political magazine Politico on November 24th.  (The committee also subpoenaed former President Donald Trump’s current spokesperson, Taylor Budowich raising up their count of Djonald’s fingerlings to forty, more or less, as well as over seven hundred mindless minions - See Attachments 1, 2, 3 and 4 from Reuters, the WashPost, NPR and the Associated Press).

The subpoenas demanding documents and testimony expanded the “select committee’s inquiry focused on the planning and financing of the rally at the Ellipse, by targeting operatives who appear to have had contacts with the Trump White House,” according to a Guardian U.K. commentary two days earlier.  The StoneJonesies are accused, among other malfeasancery, of giving speeches to Trump supporters on Jan. 5, urging them to push back against the election results.

Jones was recorded telling the crowd to de-escalate and avoid conflicts with police on Jan. 6. Prosecutors have stated in court filings perused by Politico since the attack that police did not see Jones' attempts at deescalation as helpful amid the chaos that day and came after Jones had led a large throng of Trump supporters into a restricted area of the Capitol.

“I don’t know how this is all going to end, but if they want to fight, they better believe they’ve got one,” Jones told a crowd at Freedom Plaza in Washington the night before the attack, as PBS has detailed.

Stone, who was previously convicted of lurking and skulking with intent to intend and ordered off to jail before his sentence was commuted, has also been through the civil courts wringer… Politico disclosed that a group of Capitol Police officers has sued him and a host of other defendants — including Trump himself — alleging civil rights violations. The suit accuses Stone of actively participating in “Trump’s strategy to disseminate false claims of election fraud,” and of helping popularize the #StopTheSteal slogan – rather in the manner that Kelloggs’ Sugar Froster Flakes’ spokesbeast Tony the Tiger popularized “They’re grreeeat!” or the Penguin’s nemesis… Stone, who tattooed his entire backside with an undulating portrait of Richard Nixon has been known to favor the spiffy attire, cigarette holder and top hat of that 60’s television villain… Batman’s popularization of “To the Batmobile, Robin.”  Politico cites a tweet from rival rag The Hill that a process server presented Stone with the lawsuit on Sept. 15 while he was on a talk radio show. 

“This is a big, big stack of papers, which is good because we're out of toilet paper today,” Stone told the hosts.

He later called the suit “baseless, groundless, and unsubstantiated” in an email to CNN.

 

 

To be hauled up before a court of law and join the Three Musketeers (or Three Stooges… three blind rats?) of insurrectional criminality are a couple of pilot-fish attached to He Whose Name Cannot Be Uttered in a criminal context – that unindicted co-conspirator-in-Chief, Donald Trump.  These terrible nitwits who join Public Idiot Number One, Bannon, in disgrace and probable disconnection from freedom are No. 2) previously convicted and pardoned Roger (“The Penguin”) Stone and No. 3) conspiracy theorist and school massacre denialist Alex Jones.  Together, this three-headed Dunciad brought to the lethal stupidity of Team Trump some rare and lowbrow levity for the four years of that unique administration and… lest Don Jones chuckles at their follies and looks forward to… something… he might well be advised to pay attention to the polls that have Djonald Undeterred leading the parade of pink elephants for 2024’s Republican nomination and just a few more Biden foreign policy, economic and/or overwokened gaffes from a second term as President. 

For a politician who has steadfastly elevated personal loyalty over the welfare of his country, and whose vengeance will be swift and terrible for all of those who served him in Term One but then deserted to the private sector or a tiny, tax-free island, these three clowns and a few more distinctly unfunny skunks on the White House lawn are poised to leap out of prison on yet another pardon and into positions of high eminence and esteem.

Can Don Jones picture Alex Jones as commanding the NSA or CIA or FBI or some other militarized agency (although not Defense… that post will revert to the tender guidance of Michael Flynn)?  Mister Stone as Attorney General, if Rudy G. is too decrepit or demented to fill the post, or, with his veddy diplomatic top hat and Nixon tattoo, as Secretary of State?  And Bannon as Chief of Staff?  Toss in a few root vegetables such as “Darkside Stephen” Miller, Sebastian Gorka, Paul Manafort, Gen. Flynn and a few Congressional luminaries as Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Col.) and, of course, Marjorie Taylor Green (Q-Ga) and you have a Team Trump Two thankfully rid of distractive deplorables such as Gen. Mark Milley, novice author Mike Meadows or even Mike Pence.

Will we bother on J-6, 2025 when, once again… “They’re Heeere!”

 

Taking our Stooges in alphabetical order… we comence with…  

 

MISTER BANNON…

Born in Norfolk, VA in 1953, the twice-married, twice-divorced Bannon was described as a hippie-type in high school, but then joined the Navy and took a sharp right turn.  He attended Harvard Business School, worked for Goldman-Sachs and then, according to Josh Rogin’s “Chaos Under Heaven”, a Chinese gambling website called IGE before settling in to the Breitbarterverse.

“It takes real nerve to lead a populist, anti-Chinese movement,” Rogin tipped his hat, after working for Goldman – Sachs, or for, essentially, the Chinese mob, not well-inclined towards traitors.  But nervy pivots enabled Steve-O to rappel up the greasy pole as he set into motion what Rogin called his “grand scheme”… to “link the American far right and far left in a nationalist, populist movement.”  Not so different than the “ring theory” subscribed to by independent 2024 candidates Jack “Catfish” Parnell and Austin Tillerman except that, unlike the latter, he has no quarter for environmentalism and, unlike the former, his “nationalism” is the sort of pro-Russian, anti-Chinese (and coded anti-black) racism that President Trump would peddle to his base in lieu of tangible economic reforms.

“Russia is a fuckin’ sideshow, dude,” he told Rogin, on the record.

“One flaw in his plan, of course,” Rogin subsequently responded, “was that the far right and far left, arguably, have much more antipathy for each other than they do common interests.”  But that was before Trump got into office, replaced economic justice with racism and tax cuts for the rich and when, in fact, Alex Jones’ “Info Wars” could advance credible left-wing conspiracy theories and Roger Stone, like Bannon and Jones, subscribed to Libertarian cultural programmes which Steve-O, Trump and… most notably… the Trump Supremes are hard at work erasing.

 

This well travelled, multinational kickout has to be Exhibit A in our episodes of “They Must Be Democrats” here and here, under the subset of the hippie-to-fascist metamorphosis.  And the cultural pivoting is, by no means, ancient history…

The American Independent dredged up old (2017) of the Bannon family “porn and meth house” in Miami wherein his landlord, Carlos Herrera, “painted a picture of what initially seemed to be a normal tenancy but soon evolved into an almost daily parade of debauchery and drug use, including run-ins with the police.”  Bannon has since acknowledged that his third wife did have a drug and alcohol problem, but denied sharing any of her vices even if, like Oxford school shooter Ethan Crumbley’s perents, he was aware of and abetted her predilections.

“The conclusion is she was probably cooking meth in here,” Herrera said of Bannon's ex-wife, which would have explained the damage done to the bathtub and kitchen sink.  Testimony by a realtor, handyman and several pest control technician also attested to the house being used as a porn studio, but Steve-O was not specifically accused despite allegations from the exterminator who, according to subsequent tenant Lawrence Curtis, fingered an unnamed male tenant, “a heavy set man,” who offered him "girls for sex and/or drugs in lieu of payment," telling Curtis it would blow his mind to know what “what went on in the house.”

When the oven range needed repair, no repairmen would come to the house despite the service warranty, Curtis said, because ‘that house is evil and the people are evil.’”

Steve-O has come full circle… Newsweek remarking on his advocacy of culture war (See Attachment Five) in which sex and drugs (if not rock and roll) focus on presumed “inferior” races like the blacks (and Chinese – despite the goliath nation’s abject to inferiority among present day beats and boppers).

 

In October, the House Select Committee investigating the Capitol riots voted to indict Steve Bannon with nine Republicans defecting including, of course, Wyoming’s Liz Cheney. 

A month later – in fact, acknowledging (if not exactly celebrating the 59th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas – the hammer came down on the Stone/Jonesies.

So – next in this trio of terror and terrorability?

 

MISTER JONES…

Alex (only casual relationship to Don, somewhat more to Dow) Jones was born 1974 in Dallas, attended (but did not graduate from) Austin Community College in the town otherwise known for the U. Texas Longhorns, and toiled as a talk radio dj for several small outlets before hitching his star to the burgeoning conspiracy business – launching his publication, radio podcast and end-times merchandising monolith – becoming an influential and, for a time (until the civil justice system intervened), a very wealthy man.  InfoWars sells subscriptions and a bundles of books (many written by Jones), but its fattest cash cow is its online merchandising of survival gear and allegedly “natural” vitamin supplements like Bodease and Down N’Out, supposedly capable of curing everything from cancer to Covic to chronic liberalism.

In Austin, Jones quit football and smoking pot (“It made me paranoid”), and began consuming history: Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. “I started understanding that governments have been staging terror and dealing drugs throughout history,” he says. “The whole program was there.”  Rolling stone  he has since alleged persons unknown but definitely un-american have been slipping sedatives into President Trump’s beloved Diet Coke in order to make him appear confused or senile,

 

The Austin-American Statesman (in March, 2020, see Attachment Six) reported that Mister Jones had been ordered to undergo very un-libertarian mandatory drug and alcohol testing during a custody dispute with then-wife Erika Wulff Jones.

Prior to being scooped up in the nets of the House panel, the choleric conspiracy-monger was already in hot (if not yet boiling) water for insisting that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre was a fake… a spectacle staged, like the moon landing, by nefarious persons for nefarious means.  Some of the parents of the murdered students took offense and a court found him liable for defamation in their lawsuit. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have also removed pages associated with Jones and his Infowars show for violating the services’ community standards.

And then, there is…

 

MISTER STONE…

Born in Norwalk, Ct in 1952, the twice-married once-divorced Penguin attended George Washington U, but did not graduate

A self-described "dirty trickster" and frequent guest on Jones’ radio shows, Stone, following the last major House inquiry into election integrity, after the 2016 election, “was convicted in federal court of obstructing Congress and telling five lies, about his efforts to contact WikiLeaks on behalf of the Trump campaign. He had sat for a more than a three-hour interview in 2017 with a Republican-led House committee. (CNN)

“At his criminal trial, which occurred before the end of the Trump administration, the Justice Department successfully argued Stone lied to Congress to protect Trump but the Penguin’s 40-month prison sentence for seven felonies was cut short by Trump's commutation last July.

In 2008, the pre-penguin (sans top hat and cigarette but already flaunting his Nixon tattoo) met the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin at the Miami Velvet strip club where the self-described “trysexual” partied with the strippers and hookers… Libertarian leanings already manifesting… and discoursed on “hardball” politics.  (See Attachment Seven)  The Little River Magazine in, of all places, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, reported on his two Richard Nixon-shaped bongs (See Eight), dubbing Stone a “snazzy-dressing swinger with a bodybuilding physique and a tattoo of Nixon on his back, (who) is a libertine who might like to toke.”

While ostensibly united on their devotion to Trump, the three stooges have been known to occasionally snipe upon one another as specifically disloyalty to themselves.  Stone, for example, excoriated the businessman cum conspiracy monger for not making his merching services accessible for his “iconic” ‘Roger Stone did nothing wrong’ T-Shirts.   Stone told the Jim Norton & Sam Roberts show on SiriusXM that: “It was the T-shirt I was arrested in, and he’s not selling them. I’ve expected a nice contribution to my legal defense fund, and have not received one. I’m a little disappointed.”  (The Daily Beast, See Attachment Nine)

Although there are some instances of their having previously worked in tandem, each possesses at least one invisible, indomitable bozo-zistic trait that, chained together in a little clown car, makes them a formidable agent of chaos and catastrophe.

The House Select Committee said Alex Jones helped organize and fund the Jan. 6 rally at the Ellipse. The panel also said Mr. Jones “has repeatedly promoted unsupported allegations of election fraud” and has “knowledge about the plans of the former President with respect to the rally.” (Washington Times, November 22nd)

Mr. Stone is sought by the committee for speaking at a rally in Washington on Jan. 5 and for allegedly soliciting “support to pay for security” in connection with the rally on stopthesteal.org. The committee also said Mr. Stone contracted members of the Oath Keepers to provide personal security at the rally.

“The Select Committee‘s work is of the highest importance and urgency: It is investigating one of the darkest episodes in our Nation’s history, a deadly assault on the United States Capitol, the Vice President, and Congress, and an unprecedented disruption of the peaceful transfer of power,” wrote Douglas Letter, general counsel at the House of Representatives representing the Select Committee, to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

 

According to persons familiar with the prosecution, conspirators… including Bannon, Jones, (perhaps Stone and perhaps Meadows)... attended meetings at DC’s Willard Hotel – there for the purpose of “stopping the steal”, as it were, by pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to overturn all or part of the Electoral College results, sufficient to deliver the election to the President.

Stone was at a “command center” at the Willard on 5 January, reported the liberal Guardian UK, where Trump lieutenants “strategized late into the night” about how to subvert the results of the 2020 election at the joint session of Congress.

NPR’s Morning Edition (11/23)  reported that the hotel meeting and guests are major areas of interest for the committee; Stone joining other subpoenaed guests who were also at the hotel, including former Trump strategist Bannon, attorney John Eastman, ex-national security adviser Michael Flynn and Bernard Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner who was later sent to prison and then pardoned by The Donald.

 

(“Willard”, just coincidentally, is also known as the titular human character in several motion pictures about lonely, abused young boys befriending rats in their houses – developing ratlike characteristics themselves.  If the Committee is fortunate, the Capitol conspirators will soon be ratting out one another and perhaps… eventually… the Big Cheese himself!)

 

Also, at an earlier convocation at the Willard on December 12th, Washington, D.C., police are now allegedly investigating Jones over an allegation that he threatened to shove a pro-Trump organizer off of a stage outside the hotel.

Kylie Jane Kremer, executive director of the organization Women for America First, filed the allegation to the police department, according to a police filing obtained by The Hill. The complaint said that someone on Dec. 11 "threatened to shove her off the stage at her event" scheduled for the next day. 

The complaint did not specifically name Jones, but sources told CNN that Jones made the threat.

The interaction allegedly took place outside the Willard Intercontinental hotel near the White House. Women for America First had been planning an event to support then-President Trump.

D.C. police confirmed to The Hill that they are investigating claims of “threats to do bodily harm.” Neither Women for America First nor Infowars, the show Jones hosts, responded to requests for comment from The Hill.

The D.C. police said they could not provide further details on the case given that their investigation is ongoing.

An attorney for Jones denied to CNN that his client threatened Kremer.

Our three bozos have been intrepid promulgators of Djonald Ungratefu;’s favorite issues… even where he has repeatedly denounced, denied or disparaged their labors… an all-to-familiar Trumpian trope.

And, on occasion, they ratted back!

Bannon, Jones and Stone have all succored the vaxx and mask refuseniks and decried the plague fighters – from obvious villains like Dr. Fauci to, even, the secret vaxx-compliant Trump (whom Jones, an invermectin addict, calls “pigheaded”).  Bannon, it has been reported, has even collaborated with despicable Chinese theorists!

Steve-O’s “economic nationalism” was too much for, even, then-President Trump – who gave him the sack, setting the volatile patriot off on a murky mission to Italy to start some sort of school for revanched fascists… which labors got him thrown out of that country.  Jones has sided with Joe Manchin (a hard lump in the shoe for the last several Presidents) on Big Coal and Stone… currently considering a primary gubernatorial campaign against Florida’s insufficiently conservative Ron de Santis… once defected from the Republicans to hook up with the Libertarian Party, dismissing 2012 candidates as “hopelessly [expletive] up.”

His withering assesment of the GOP, captured by the Washpost, extended to its top contenders for president: Mitt Romney “converted to conservatism” to run; Newt Gingrich was a “thrice married ego-maniac with delusions of grandeur”; Rick Santorum “a religious fanatic who would tell other people how to live.”  God alone knows what he thought of a Bob Dole or John McCain.

Only upon the emergence of Trumpism did the black sheep return to the fold.

         

Records and documents previously reviewed by The Washington Post also have shown how Jones and Stone have promoted extremist groups such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers and have ties to some individuals who have already been charged by the government with coordinating and planning certain parts of the breach.

Stewart Rhodes, for example, was a little-known libertarian blogger, according to Ronan Farrow’s article on American militias in the New Yorker, when he launched the Oath Keepers in early 2009.

“Rhodes appeared on Hardball and The O’Reilly Factor, where his ideas were called dangerous; on conservative talk radio, where they were met more favorably; and on The Alex Jones Show, where he was featured so often that he and Jones became friends.”  Like Jones, he supported himself by selling combat merch like branded body armor on the social media, eventually accumulating half a million followers like Donovan Crowl, a fifty-year-old former marine arrested at the Capitol after he began to express increasing ardor for Trump and to embrace conspiracy theories. “It’s stuff he heard from that psychopath Alex Jones and those echo chambers on the Internet,” his sister Denissa Crowl told Farrow.

And then, there is… of course… the money.

"The Select Committee is seeking information about the rallies and subsequent march to the Capitol that escalated into a violent mob attacking the Capitol and threatening our democracy," the committee's chair, Thompson, D-Miss., said in his statement to NPR.  "We need to know who organized, planned, paid for, and received funds related to those events, as well as what communications organizers had with officials in the White House and Congress."

Rep. Thompson might (and probably will) want to take a closer look into the Trump family affairs.

 

Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr.'s girlfriend who also served as an advisor to the former president, reportedly boasted about raising millions of dollars to bankroll Donald Trump's "Stop the Steal" rally, which directly led to the violent riot on the Capitol. (Salon 11/18/21)

According to a Thursday report by ProPublica, Guilfoyle was at the center of a sweeping fundraising operation involving a number of big money Republican donors – namely Julie Jenkins Fancelli, a Publix supermarket heir. "Literally one of my donors Julie at 3 million," Guilfoyle said, an ostensible reference to the amount raised through Fancelli. 

Guilfoyle and her deputy, Caroline Wren, arranged for “certain far-right speakers” including Stone, Jones and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton – a major proponent of Trump's election conspiracy – to be added to a lineup already top heavy on downpunchers, including their top heavy of all, the President. 

Back in July, however, Raw Story revealed that Djonald Ungrateful reportedly told close aides he found Guilfoyle "annoying" and has been less than enthusiastic over her latest project… promoting disgraced former Missouri Governor Eric Greitens who is seeking the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Sen. Roy Blunt.  Greitens was thrown out of office in 2018 over sexual abuse and blackmail allegations and Trump believes he has the anti-mojo to lose a key red state office in the midterms – now less than a year away – going so far as to compare Guilfoyle to Eva Perón. 

But Salon believes Guilfoyle has remained in Trump's good graces as a leading fundraiser – after all, she is also currently spearheading Trump's "Make America Great Again, Again!" super PAC, launched in early October.

(See Attachments Ten A and Ten B)

 

More recently, the probers have plucked the former Chief of Staff (and recipient of Trump’s puzzled “They must be Democrats!” remark on the day of the insurrection) Mark Meadows out of his post-Trump day job with Jim deMint’s conservative lobbying lunks, served him with papers and… should he defy the probers… charge him with contempt.  Meadows, not the sort of fellow who would do well in prison, has since been rumoured to be “co-operating” with the political police.  (Al Jazeera, see Attachment Eleven)

“The Select Committee is seeking information about the rallies and subsequent march to the Capitol that escalated into a violent mob attacking the Capitol and threatening our democracy,” Thompson (D-Miss.) told Politico. “We need to know who organized, planned, paid for, and received funds (to guilfoyle? and Budowich?) related to those events, as well as what communications organizers had with officials in the White House and Congress.”

Thompson said in the subpoena letter to Stone that the Penguin was being subpoenaed to explain why he had been invited to lead the march to the Capitol on 6 January from the rally at the Ellipse, but, like Djonald Unattending, curiously, did not ultimately frequent the rally or go near the Capitol.

Instead, contended NPR, Stone and Jones, should face potential criminal charges for being Capitol riote “influencers” through their networks and actions.

In a statement, Stone said he had yet to receive the subpoena but denied any responsibility for the violence on Jan. 6.

“I have said time and time again that I had no advance knowledge of the events that took place at the Capitol on that day,” he said.

With the net closing in on all those dogfish, blowfish, remorae and squid gamers prowling the legal and ethical seabeds, the panel has demanded all of its subpoena targets turn over relevant documents by Dec. 6. Depositions for them have been scheduled for the following week.

 

Regarding Jones, the panel said the InfoWars founder helped organize the Jan. 6 rally on the Ellipse, claiming he was told by the White House to lead a march to the Capitol. It also said he "repeatedly promoted unsupported allegations of election fraud."

Norman Pattis, lawyer for Jones, said "the First Amendment guarantees the right of assembly and the right to petition for redress of grievances. Congress’s attempt to chill ordinary Americans in the exercise of these rights is terrifying," according to NBC News.

 

Shortly after the riot, Jones said on Infowars that he was invited by the White House on about Jan. 3 to “lead the march” to the Capitol, and that he paid nearly $500,000, mostly donated, to help organize the event on the Ellipse.

Jones promoted the event vigorously, called for 1 million marchers and told his viewers on Jan. 1, “Roger Stone spent some substantial time with Trump in Florida just a few days ago, and I’m told big things are afoot and Trump’s got major actions up his sleeve.”

A day before the insurrection, Jones urged a pro-Trump crowd at Freedom Plaza in downtown Washington “to resist the globalists” with his refrain, “I don’t know how all this is all going to end, but if they want to fight, they better believe they’ve got one!” In a Jan. 6 post from near the same spot, he declared “1776” — a term co-opted by Trump fans urging a kind of second revolution against the government. “We’re under attack, and we need to understand this is 21st-century warfare and get on a war footing,” Jones was quoted in the 2/20/21 WashPost.

 

Stone has also publicly distanced himself from the violence and criticized it, telling Moscow-funded RT television on Jan. 8 that he was invited to lead a march but “I declined.” He said in the same interview that when he addressed a rally at the Supreme Court on Jan. 5, he intended “peaceful protest” and added, “I have specifically denounced the violence at the Capitol, the intrusion in the Capitol. That’s not how we settle things in America.”

In the Jan. 5 speech, Stone characterized the next day’s events as “an epic struggle for the future of this country between dark and light . . . the godly and the godless . . . good and evil.”

Stone’s attorney Grant Smith said in a statement, “There is no evidence whatsoever that Roger Stone was involved in any way, or had advance knowledge about the shocking attack that took place at the US Capitol on January 6th. Any implication to the contrary using ‘guilt by association’ is both dishonest and inaccurate.”

 

Al Jazeera News has reported that Meadows’s lawyer, George Terwilliger, said he was continuing to work with the committee and its staff on a “potential accommodation” that would not require Meadows to waive executive privilege nor “forfeit the long-standing position that senior White House aides cannot be compelled to testify before Congress”, as Trump has argued.  (See Attachment Eleven)

Terwilliger, said he was continuing to work with the committee and its staff on a “potential accommodation” that would not require Meadows to waive executive privilege nor “forfeit the long-standing position that senior White House aides cannot be compelled to testify before Congress”, as Trump has argued.

Citing that claim of executive privilege from Mr. Trump, the Times also reported Mr. Meadows’s lawyer, Mr. Terwilliger said his client could not “in good conscience” provide testimony out of an “appreciation for our constitutional system and the separation of powers,” asserting that doing so would “undermine the office and all who hold it.”

That stance was condemned by the leaders of the committee, Mr. Thompson and Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and the vice chairwoman, who accused Mr. Meadows of defying a lawful subpoena. They said they would consider pursuing contempt charges to enforce it.

Mr. Thompson and Ms. Cheney called Mr. Trump’s privilege claims “spurious,” and added that many of the matters they wished to discuss with Mr. Meadows “are not even conceivably subject to any privilege claim, even if there were one.”  (See Attachment Thirteen)

 

While a conviction on any contempt or conspiracy charges for the three amigos would be almost certain in some Federal courts, due to partisanship, or almost impossible in others, the recent abortion debate among the Supremes augurs that SCOTUS will move aggressively to validate the former President’s trust in them (at least to a greater extent than they conceded his right to overturn the election).  At issue is the issue of Executive Privilege… one: does it apply to ex-Presidents, and two: if so, does it apply to civilians either in the employ of or in collaboration with the Executive.

A question/answer scorecard appended to the New York Times article of Nov. 30th on E.P. asked and answered these concerns, as applicable to Mr. Bannon, as follows…

“Is executive privilege an absolute power? No. Even a legitimate claim of executive privilege may not always prevail in court. During the Watergate scandal in 1974, the Supreme Court upheld an order requiring President Richard M. Nixon to turn over his Oval Office tapes.

“May ex-presidents invoke executive privilege? Yes, but courts may view their claims with less deference than those of current presidents. In 1977, the Supreme Court said Nixon could make a claim of executive privilege even though he was out of office, though the court ultimately ruled against him in the case.

“Is Steve Bannon covered by executive privilege? This is unclear. Mr. Bannon’s case could raise the novel legal question of whether or how far a claim of executive privilege may extend to communications between a president and an informal adviser outside of the government.”

 

(See the New York Times, Attachment Twelve)

 

The accused are, of course, presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.  Given the composition of SCOTUS, they are probably not making plans to pack their toothbrushes and man up for a long time away from home – although their ultimate punishments, like those of almost all of the Chicago rioters one calendar round (52 years) since their trials are likely to be mild compared to the hard time doled out to their hapless followers like feet-on-the-desk guy (2021 variant), crying cop basher guy and the Q-Anon Shaman.

But Bannon, at least, the penultimate Trump “(alt- ) Democrat, may have been playing Don Jones all along.  60’s revolutionaries like Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, Mark Rudd, Jeff Jones are all out of jail and doing fine (Abbie Hoffman, however, committed suicide, Jerry Rubin became a multi-level marketeer and was run over in Hollywood – and the fate of Pigasus (lauded by Phil Ochs, who also killed himself) remains unknown, although it is probable that he ended up in the belly of the Beast (a hungry cop).

JFK (senior and/or junior) did not return from the clouds on his 58th murderversary… (you’d think he’d have the class to wait until November 22nd, 2023!) but Q-anon remains undeterred, Donald Trump and Mitchy McConnell remain undeterred, the former’s High Court is wielding its power and a majority of Americans find President Joe to be weak and dithering on issues from Afghanistan to rolling out the vaxxes to the economy.  A crushing defeat and two years of obstruction loom for 2022 and potential obliteration for 2024 (whether via Russian or Chinese nukes, climate apocalypse or, as posited by more than a few negative positers, “the breakdown of the American social covenant.”

Be afraid.  Be very afraid.

 

 

 

NOVEMBER 26 – DECEMBER 2

 

 

Friday, November 26, 2021

 

Infected: 48,177,907

Dead:  776,349

Dow:  36,089.86

 

 

World pivots to lockdown mode as unknown, unnamed new variant spreads into double digits in South Africa.  Dow falls by nearly 1,000 points.  Doctors predict that refusenik Thanksgiving gatherings will lead to a ten percent rise in plague cases.

   Pundits call Black Friday “strange” – prices mixed, sales volume down.  Supply chainsaw massacre blamed.  Mall shootings in Durham, NC and Tacoma, WA.

   Claire, the Scots (not Scottish) Deerhound wins National Dog Show for the second year consecutively.  Her grandmother also won the blue ribbon ten years ago.

   RIP iconic composer/arranger Steven Sondheim (“Send In the Clowns”).  Tributes pour in from the likes of Lin Manuel Miranda.

 

 

Saturday, November 27, 2021

 

Infected:  48,202,463

Dead:  776,536

 

 

           

 

The South African variant gets a name (B-11529) and bursts out of Africa, infecting humans in Israel and Hong Kong.  Dr. Fauci warns the world that it “can go all over.”  Other doctors call it “stickier” (meaning it may not be “recognized” by the three existing vaccines (sort of in the way that Liz Cheney is not “recognized” by the Congressional Republicans) and call for a crash program to impose the “Three D’s” (“Define”, “Detect” and “Destroy!).  Instead, America (and others) impose a travel ban on South Africa and up to eight other African nations… who call the ban racist. 

   It’s Small Business Saturday.  But shoppers are still pursuing many extended Black Friday bargains.  So do flash mob looters whose definition of “bargain” is “free” and whose maraudings are graduating to murdering security guards.

 

 

 

Sunday, November 28, 2021

 

Infected:  48,229,210

Dead:  776,639

                

 

 

Tired of B-11529 after only one day, the W.H.O. goes back to the Greek (letter “O” as in “Oh, sh…”) and re-names it Omicron, calling it “a virus of concern” (in the manner of swamp strangler Brian Laundrie being called a “person of interest”.  New cases emerge in Belgium, Australia, France and… as the sun sets in the West… Canada.  Dr. Fauci predicts it’ll take two weeks to determine how transmissible and lethal it is, by which time Omicron will “inevitably” come to America.

   TrezSec Yellin reminds a plague-panicked public that the debt “limit” will be reached by December 15th, although other can-kickers maintain that the “ceiling” will actually be reached on Friday, the third.  Sen, Bill Cassidy (R-La) accuses President Joe’s “Build Back Better” of buttressing billionaires with tax breaks – points to a common millionaire making 500K/yr. getting a 12K tax credit on an 80K electric car.

   With Thanksgiving’s leftovers being put (or thrown) away, the Christmas hoopla begins (although it’s also the first night of Hanukkah).  On the busiest travel day of the year, a Guatemalan stoway catches a free ride in the wheelwell of a passenger jet to Miami.  F.A.A. warns that Christmas light displays can blind pilots.

 

 

 

Monday, November 29, 2021

 

Infected:  48,437,955

Dead:  778,601

Dow:  35,135.94

 

               

 

Cyber Monday dawns as the world goes back to work… buying and selling stuff.

The Dow, scoffing “What variant?” bounces back on lower oil prices.  It’s the variant  in thirteen countries now, the one with fifty mutations, some of which… the doctors say… contain “immune escape potential”.  Travel blackouts multiply – the last South African flights arrive in the white world (Morocco has the strongest – no foreign or domestic flights anywhere!) and, of 600 deplaning in the Netherlands, 61 have the plague.  Africans scream “Racism!”

   President Joe calls the plague “a cause for concern, not panic.”  Dr. Fauci counsels “don’t freak out”, take the usual precautions (vaxxing, masking, social distancing)… get boosters now, don’t wait for an Omicron-specific shot, (not expected for at least “a couple of months,” a Moderna source says.  Dr. Jha says the boosters will provide “a little bit of protection or a lot of protection.”  Dr. Oz announces he will run for Pennsylvania Senator as a pro-Trump Republican.  Pro-Trump state courts overturn Federal vaxxing mandates, citing “freedom”. 

   Ex-Governor Andrew Cuomo pleads not guilty to “misdemeanor forcible touching” and claims that women solicited him for hugs.  He goes on trial in January.

 

 

 

Tuesday, November 30, 2021

 

Infected: 48,554,890               Dead:  780,140

Dow:  34,483.72

 

 

It’s “Giving Tuesday” and more and more people giving the gift of Omnicron… new cases spring up in Japan and France.  “It would be surprising if America didn’t have it in a week,” says Dr. Collins, Fauci’s boss at NIH. “We may be tired of the variant, but the variant is not tired of us.  We have to hang on for a couple more weeks.”

   Rittenhouse and Arbury trials verdicts in (until the appeals) but trials are busting out all over: actor Jussie Smolett for faking racist attack, Epstein galpal Ghislaine Maxwell for procuring children (her lawyers call her “scapegoat”), policewoman Kim Potter for mistaking gun for taser in Minnesota, Elizabeth Holmes maintaining her Theranos boss “Sunny” Balwani abused her into committing fraud, Cuomo brother Chris fingered as an accessory to hugging, promptly fired by CNN and prosecutors even dredge up old Bill Cosby, ask SCOTUS to send him back to jail.  (The Supremes are busy liquidating Roe v. Wade even though 75% of Joneses say “Don’t!”)

   Barbados “barbexits” from the no-longer United Kingdom, shakes off QE2 and declares independence.  Back in Britain, sixty one fanthings attending an Oasis impersonator concert at a pub are snowed in for three days.  Fortunately, there’s plenty of beer.  But so little maple syrup in North America that the Quebec Cartel has to release fifty million bottles from its strategic reserve stockpile.

 

 

 

Wednesday, November 24, 2021

 

Infected: 48,692,483

Dead:  782,100

Dow:  34,804.38

 

 

 

First Big-O case arrives in America six days before Dr. Collins’ prognostication… a California man just back from South Africa.  15 year old Ethan Crumbley proves people can kill people too, shoots eleven (four dead so far) at his school in Oxford, Mich.  16 year old boy shoots Mommy in Dallas. Tucson cop fired for shooting a man in a wheelchair. 

   Newly liberated Barbados designates Rihanna a national heroine while the French retaliate (?) by awarding a national heroine award to Josephine Baker for singing and spying on Nazis.  A movie here?  Movie set shooter Alec Baldwin denies pulling the trigger on set, blames his quick-draw trainer Thell Reed and somebody named “Kenny”. 

   Mrs. El Chapo gets three years in prison for perpetuating the family business.  WalMart shoplifter gets the max… a $2.1 jury judgement for false arrest.  Lakers’ Lebron James just gets it (the plague).   

  

 

 

 

Thursday, November 25, 2021

 

Infected:  48,832,228

Dead:  785,898

Dow:  Closed for Thanksgiving

  

 

 

Oxford killer Crumbley’s notebooks and social media posts being scoured by the authorities who call him a terrorist and plan to charge him as an adult, also charging Daddy, who gave him the gun, as an idiot.

   Chief Justice Roberts and Beer Boy Brett grease the slide for Roe repeal by stating that states, not Feds, should make policy and that “the Court has often overturned precedent.”  Partisans march, shriek, battle outside, some waving signs that say “Fear God!” (or He, not we, will melt the polar icecaps?). Also in DC, American bankruptcy looms because some Republicans are holding the can-kicking hostage to abolition of vaxxing mandates.

   People’s people-of-the-year are Sandra Oh, Simone Biles and Dolly Parton, who exclaims: “I’m older than yesterday and younger than tomorrow.”

 

 

Fat and happy after a Thanksgiving feast, the Joneses… a few bitter Native Americans excepted… burped and snuggled, watched football and enjoyed a long holiday (with another few exceptions).  The Index was similarly sluggish except for the unemployment rates, two of three which fell significantly with plenty of holiday and permanent job available (although watch out for the inflation spike next week).  Childcare remains a problem – President Joe’s desire to stuff it into his Infra Two remains stalled, because of Sen. Manchin who, perhaps, plans to fill the stockings of Big Coal by destroying Christmas and filling millions of children’s stockings with the stuff instead of the usual (Chinese) toys beneath the tree (and trees are in short supply too).  Still and all, it was a near-record week for the Don as it crawls back towars parity with 2013 – and it would’ve done even better if it weren’t for those damned Russians.

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE DON JONES INDEX

 

CHART of CATEGORIES w/VALUE ADDED to EQUAL BASELINE of 15,000

(REFLECTING… approximately… DOW JONES INDEX of June 27, 2013)

 

See a further explanation of categories here…

 

ECONOMIC INDICES (60%)

DON JONES’ PERSONAL ECONOMIC INDEX

(45% of TOTAL INDEX POINTS)

 

 

 

CATEGORY

VALUE

BASE

RESULTS

SCORE

SCORE

OUR SOURCES and COMENTS

INCOME

24%

6/17/13

LAST

CHANGE

NEXT

 11/26/21

 12/321

SOURCE 

Wages (hourly, per capita)

9%

1350 points

 10/8/21

   +0.42%

 12/10/21

1,487.38

1,487.38

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/wages  26.26 nc

Median Income (yearly)

4%

600

 11/26/21

  +0.02%

 12/10/21

676.12

676.27

http://www.usdebtclock.org/   35,749

*Unempl. (BLS – in millions

4%

600

 11/26/21

   -9.52%

 12/10/21

436.39

477.95

http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000/  4.2%

*Official (DC – in millions)

2%

300

 11/26/21

  +0.12%

 12/10/21

529.58

530.23

http://www.usdebtclock.org/      7,365

*Unofficl. (DC – in millions)

2%

300

 11/26/21

   -8.4%

 12/10/21

436.36

473.01

http://www.usdebtclock.org/    12,250

Workforce Participtn.

     Number  

     Percent

2%

300

11/26/21

 

 +0.013%

    +0.65%

 12/10/21

 

 

319.34

 

 

321.43

In 154,168 out 100,472 Total: 254,640

 

http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 60.15

WP %  (ycharts)*

1%

150

 10/8/21

   -0.16%

 12/10/21

152.23

152.23

https://ycharts.com/indicators/labor_force_participation_rate    

61.60 nc

OUTGO

(15%)

Total Inflation

7%

1050

 11/12/21

+0.9%

 12/10/21

964.60

964.60

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm     +0.9 nc

Food

2%

300

 11/12/21

+0.9%

 12/10/21

270.11

270.11

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm     +0.9

Gasoline

2%

300

 11/12/21

+6.1%

 12/10/21

236.57

236.57

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm     +6.1*

Medical Costs

2%

300

 11/12/21

+0.5%

 12/10/21

283.62

283.62

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm     +0.5

Shelter

2%

300

 11/12/21

+0.5%

 12/10/21

285.89

285.89

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm     +0.5

WEALTH

(6%)

 

Dow Jones Index

2%

300

 11/26/21

    -0.14%

 12/10/21

382.69

382.15

https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/index/DJIA  35,870.95

Home (Sales) 

   (Valuation)

1%

1%

150

150

 11/26/21

   +0.79%

   +0.31%

 12/10/21

201.36

178.11            

201.36

178.11            

https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics

     Sales (M):  6.29 6.34 Valuations (K):  352.8 nc 353.9

Debt (Personal)

2%

300

 11/26/21

   +0.08%

 12/10/21

264.99

264.78

http://www.usdebtclock.org/    66,610

* Fuel oil up 12.3 for November, 59.1% for year!

 

 

AMERICAN ECONOMIC INDEX (15% of TOTAL INDEX POINTS)

NATIONAL

(10%)

 

Revenue (trilns.)

2%

300

 11/26/21

 +0.025%

 12/10/21

346.40     

346.49     

debtclock.org/       4,052

Expenditures (tr.)

2%

300

 11/26/21

  -0.04%

 12/10/21

218.61

218.51

debtclock.org/       6,858

National Debt tr.)

3%

450

 11/26/21

 +0.04%

 12/10/21

316.89

316.76

http://www.usdebtclock.org/    29,003

Aggregate Debt (tr.)

3%

450

 11/26/21

 +0.03%

 12/10/21

371.59

371.48

http://www.usdebtclock.org/    85,114

GLOBAL

(5%)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Foreign Debt (tr.)

2%

300

 11/26/21

 +0.09%

 12/10/21

273.70     

273.45     

http://www.usdebtclock.org/   7,678

Exports (in billions)

1%

150

 10/8/21

  -2.79%

 12/10/21

 184.54

 184.54

https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/index.html  207.9 nc

Imports (bl.)

1%

150

 10/8/21

 +0.52%

 12/10/21

 113.20

 113.20

https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/index.html  288.5

Trade Deficit (bl.)

1%

150

 10/8/21

 +9.39%

 12/10/21

   85.46         

   85.46         

https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/index.html    80.9

 

SOCIAL INDICES (40%) 

ACTS of MAN

(12%)

World Affairs

3%

450

11/26/21

     -0.7%

 12/10/21

381.35

378.68

Russia accused of plotting coup in Ukraine, warns US of nuclear war.  (Joe and Putin will discuss same next Tuesday.)  France designates Josephine Baker a National Hero.  Barbados declares independence from France.

Terrorism

2%

300

11/26/21

     -0.2%

 12/10/21

218.19

217.75

Rep. Lauren Bobert (R-Co) calls Squadster Ilhan Omar (D-Mn) a “suicide bomber”.  Michigan police call Oxford school shooter a terrorist.  America calls his parents assholes.

Politics

3%

450

11/26/21

     +0.2%

 12/10/21

439.03      

439.91      

Magic Mike (McConnaghy) drops out of TX governor’s race, clearing the path for Beto’s third try for office while Stacey Abrams will make her second bid for Georgia Gov. where David Perdue will carry the Trump flag into battle against incumbent Brian Kemp, who wouldn’t turn over the votes for President.  And Mike Pence explores running for Prez in 2024 against his old boss – which may make for interesting debates.  Bring a noose?

Economics

3%

450

11/26/21

     +0.5%

 12/10/21

403.84

405.86

Black Friday called “strange” with bouncing prices, overall trend down.  Some experts call Cyber Monday successful, others not.  Nobody cares about Small Business Saturday, Whatever Sunday but Giving Tuesday amasses 2.7 billion for charity.

America hits its debt limit 12/15 and its debt ceiling today.  (Late at night, enough Republicans stop exorting President Joe on vax mandates to kick the can again.)  TreaSec Yellin knows the difference – we don’t.  Supply chain issues ease as more ships crawl from port to docks to unload their Stuff.  Experts say air fares are down because “a lot of people want to just sit on the couch in January and February,” but WalMart says they’re running out of Christmas decorations and tree farms are running out of trees.  Fed Chair Powell drops the qualifier “transitory” from inflation predictions and adds that the Big-O will spur even more.

 

Crime

1%

150

11/26/21

      +0.2%

 12/10/21

237.07

237.54

Deadly child custody battle in Lubbock, Tx.  Dad kills 4 kids, Grandma in California.  Mall shooting in Tacoma, Wa.  Flash mob looters start murdering security guards.  Home invaders kill wife of record producer Clarence Avant in Beverly Hills (one captured) and police find Crumbley stumbly parents hiding in a warehouse.  Alec Baldwin denies shooting crew member on film set, blames quickdraw expert Thell Reed and a guy named “Kenny”. Experts cite 40% increase in holiday cyberscams over 2019, predict shoppers will lose $384M this year.  Exactly!

 

ACTS of GOD

 

(6%)

 

Environment/Weather

3%

450

 11/26/21

        -0.1%

 12/10/21

380.59

380.21

“Atmospheric river” continues pouring into Northwest.  Midweek frost and freeze alerts – Maine to Florida, turning milder by week’s end.  Amtrack offers rail travel BOGOs.  Weather, not the supply chain, is being blamed for the shortage of maple syrup.

Natural/Unnatural Disaster

3%

450

 11/26/21

        -0.1%

 12/10/21

218.41

218.19

One survivor in Russian coal mine blast that kills 59.  Nine injured when Amish buggy rear-ended in Wisconsin.

 

LIFESTYLE/JUSTICE INDEX   (15%)

 

Science, Tech, Education

4%

600

 11/26/21

     +0.5%

 12/10/21

402.86

404.87

Linebacker/newscaster Michael Strahan to be shot into space next week… NY Giants retire his Number 92.  US sanctions high tech profiteers for selling military secrets to China.  Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey retires (to replace Dusty Hill in Z. Z. Top?).

Equality (econ/social)

4%

600

 11/26/21

     +0.5%

 12/10/21

406.81

408.84

Talkhost Trevor Noah joins those claiming air travel ban on 8 African countries is racist.  Women’s tennis association imposes a boycott of China for disappearan of Peng Shuai.

Health

     

          

            Plague

4%

600

 11/26/21

     +0.1%

 

 

  

      +0.4%

 12/10/21

396.86

 

 

 

- 103.64

397.26

 

 

 

- 103.23

“America has criminalized mental health,” laments a malaproprist mental healther-er, calling for the decriminalization of mental health – and, over the last five years, the few remaining sane Joneses can support that!

 

Development of O-variant vaxxes, which experts say should take two to three months, might be further delayed by “intellectual property issues”.  Miss Kentucky named Miss America – goes to Israel for Miss Universe  but the whole pageant goes on lockdown after Miss France gets it.  FDA endorses Merck’s plague pill.  Yet another Trump tell-all (by Mark Meadows) reveals Djonald had the plague for his first debate with President Joe.  Lebron James also gets it.

 

Freedom and Justice

3%

450

 11/26/21

   -0.1%

 12/10/21

462.72

462.26

Arbury and Rittenhouse done (for now) but trials galore are starting up all over (see above).  SCOTUS eager to repeal Roe v. Wade and boost Caribbean vacations for the rich and the coat hanger industry for the not.  Justice Sotomayor cites the “stench” of backsliding.  British appeals court upholds Meghan Markle’s judgement against “cruel” tabloids.  UNLV suspends frat for pledgelings’ fatal fight night.

 

MISCELLANEOUS and TRANSIENT INDEX           (7%) 

 

Cultural incidents

3%

450

 11/26/21

    -0.2%

 12/10/21

 535.77

 534.70

Inspirational deaf school footballers fail in California state finals.  First MLB lockout in 30 years (anybody remember that Summer of Scabs) over… go figure!... money.  RIP composer/arranger Steven (Send in the Clowns) Sondheim, fashion designer Irving Abloh, pioneering black golfer Lee Elder… R(etire)IP Tiger Woods.

Miscellaneous incidents

4%

450

 11/26/21

   +0.2%

 12/10/21

 488.90

 489.88

Hanukkah begins.  Egypt reopens Luxor ruins just in time for Omicron. So do the Rockettes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Don Jones Index for the week of November 26th through December 2nd, 2021 was UP 83.71 points.

 

The Don Jones Index is sponsored by the Coalition for a New Consensus: retired Congressman and Independent Presidential candidate Jack “Catfish” Parnell, Chairman; Brian Doohan, Administrator.  The CNC denies, emphatically, allegations that the organization, as well as any of its officers (including former Congressman Parnell, environmentalist/America-Firster Austin Tillerman and cosmetics CEO Rayna Finch) and references to Parnell’s works, “Entropy and Renaissance” and “The Coming Kill-Off” are fictitious or, at best, mere pawns in the web-serial “Black Helicopters” – and promise swift, effective legal action against parties promulgating this and/or other such slanders.

Comments, complaints, donations (especially SUPERPAC donations) always welcome at feedme@generisis.com or: speak@donjonesindex.com.

 

ATTACHMENT ONE – From Reuters

 

November 23, 20211:00 AM ESTLast Updated 2 days ago

United States

U.S. House panel probing Capitol riot subpoenas Roger Stone, Alex Jones

By Patricia Zengerle and Jan Wolfe

WASHINGTON, Nov 22 (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives committee probing the deadly Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol said on Monday it issued subpoenas to Alex Jones, founder of the right-wing website Infowars, and Roger Stone, an ally of former President Donald Trump.

The committee also issued subpoenas seeking documents and testimony from Dustin Stockton, a political activist linked to longtime Trump adviser Steve Bannon, and Stockton's fiancee, Jennifer Lawrence.

Stockton and Lawrence were members of the group We Build the Wall, which was raided by federal agents in August 2020 as part of a fraud investigation.

It also issued a subpoena to Taylor Budowich, a spokesman for Trump.

The panel has now issued more than three dozen subpoenas and received testimony from more than 200 witnesses.

The four others who were issued the latest subpoenas did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Bannon, who defied a subpoena from the House Select Committee, was indicted earlier this month on two counts of contempt of Congress. read more

A mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 in a failed attempt to prevent formal congressional certification of his election loss to Democrat Joe Biden. The committee is scrutinizing Trump's actions relating to those events. Bannon is the first to face criminal charges arising from the panel's inquiry.

Nearly 700 people have been charged with taking part in the riot at the Capitol. It was the worst attack on the seat of the U.S. government since the War of 1812.

 

ATTACHMENT TWO – From washpost

ROGER STONE AND ALEX JONES SUBPOENAED BY HOUSE COMMITTEE INVESTIGATING JAN. 6 ATTACK

 

By Jacqueline Alemany  and Tom Hamburger  November 22, 2021 at 6:06 p.m. EST

 

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol issued subpoenas Monday to more people involved with the Stop the Steal rally, including conspiracy theorist and right-wing media figure Alex Jones and longtime Donald Trump ally Roger Stone.

The committee has asked Stone and Jones to provide testimony by Dec. 17 and Dec. 18, respectively, and to provide the panel with requested documents by Dec. 6.

Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), the committee’s chairman, wrote that Jones’s coordination with Cindy Chafian and Caroline Wren in organizing the rally that preceded the attack on the Capitol, along with his promotion of Trump’s false claims of election fraud and urging of people to travel to Washington for the Jan. 6 rally, make him a person of interest.

Thompson cites Stone’s appearance at rallies on Jan. 5 at the Supreme Court and Freedom Plaza as reason for the subpoena, along with his use of “Oath Keepers as personal security guards, several of whom were reportedly involved in the attack on the Capitol and at least one of whom has been indicted.”

The Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol was neither a spontaneous act nor an isolated event

The roles that the high-profile right-wing figures played in the Jan. 6 Capitol breach — and their potential ties to those who committed violence in the riot — are also being investigated by the Justice Department and the FBI. The investigation is ongoing.

Investigators have been working to determine whether Stone and Jones, the host of Infowars, should face potential criminal charges for influencing Capitol rioters through their networks and actions.

In a statement, Stone said he had yet to receive the subpoena but denied any responsibility for the violence on Jan. 6.

“I have said time and time again that I had no advance knowledge of the events that took place at the Capitol on that day,” he said. “Any statement, claim, insinuation, or report alleging, or even implying, that I had any involvement in or knowledge, whether advance or contemporaneous, about the commission of any unlawful acts by any person or group in or around the U.S. Capitol or anywhere in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021, is categorically false.”

Stone, a longtime confidant of Trump, has amplified the former president’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen and rife with voter fraud in the weeks leading up to the attack.

Records and documents previously reviewed by The Washington Post show that Jones and Stone have promoted extremist groups such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers and have ties to some individuals who have already been charged by the government with coordinating and planning certain parts of the breach.

Jones has spread numerous false claims about a variety of topics over the years, and courts have recently ruled he must pay damages in lawsuits filed by the families of eight people killed in the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School after he falsely said the deadly attack was a “hoax.”

Jones did not respond to a request for comment.

The committee has also subpoenaed conservative activists Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence — a couple with ties to some of the rally organizers who have already been subpoenaed by the committee. The committee letters cite Stockton and Lawrence’s work with Women for America First in organizing rallies held after the November 2020 election “in support of then-President Trump and his allegations of election fraud, up through and including the rally held on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021.”

Stockton and Lawrence released a statement accusing the committee of not acting in good faith for subpoenaing them during the week of Thanksgiving.

“In the many months since January 6th we have granted many reporters and outlets extensive on-the-record interviews because we are committed to getting to the truth about what happened,” they wrote. “We remain committed to that transparency and pray for the opportunity to share our experiences to the public without the taint of misinformation that has become customary.”

Taylor Budowich, a current spokesperson for Trump, was also subpoenaed Monday and has been asked to produce documents and appear for a deposition Dec. 16. The committee cited Budowich efforts that included “directing to the 501(c) (4) organization approximately $200,000 from a source or sources that was not disclosed to the organization to pay for the advertising campaign” for the Jan. 6 rally. He did not respond to a request for comment.

 

ATTACHMENT THREE – FROM NPR

 

ROGER STONE, ALEX JONES AMONG NEW SUBPOENAS ISSUED BY JAN. 6 PANEL

By Claudia Grisales, Updated November 23, 20219:23 AM ET 

Heard on Morning Edition

 

The Democratic-led House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol has issued five new subpoenas to several ex-Trump allies, including Roger Stone and InfoWars founder Alex Jones.

The committee said the subpoenas are focused on the planning and financing of Jan. 5 and Jan. 6 rallies in Washington, D.C., the subsequent march and deadly riot.

With this latest wave, the panel has now issued 40 subpoenas in its probe.

"The Select Committee is seeking information about the rallies and subsequent march to the Capitol that escalated into a violent mob attacking the Capitol and threatening our democracy," the committee's chair, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said in a statement. "We need to know who organized, planned, paid for, and received funds related to those events, as well as what communications organizers had with officials in the White House and Congress."

 

Jan. 6 subpoena tracker: Here's who the House panel wants to hear from

The subpoenas, which include demands for records and testimony, were also issued for Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich, Dustin Stockton, and his fiancé, Jennifer Lynn Lawrence. Both were involved in the rallies, the committee said.

Budowich did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Stockton and Lawrence issued a joint statement attacking the committee for issuing the subpoenas during the week of the Thanksgiving holiday, but said it was not a surprise and they remain committed to transparency.

All the new witnesses were told they are due to turn over documents and testify by mid-December.

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Before this new wave of testimony and document demands, the committee issued nearly three dozen subpoenas for former Trump officials, advisers and Jan. 6 rally organizers.

So far, the committee has met with about 200 unnamed witnesses, who spoke voluntarily, received 25,000 pages of documents and has gotten more than 200 tips through a hotline, said California Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a member of the panel.

Roger Stone, Alex Jones key figures ahead of attack

Stone, who was pardoned by the former president for several crimes tied to a congressional probe into the Trump 2016 campaign, participated in "Stop the Steal" efforts, the panel said.

Through an attorney, Stone said in a statement that he had not been served his subpoena and has not seen the details of what he may be asked to provide. Stone declined having any information related to the attack that took place.

 

Mark Meadows' "defiance" could lead to contempt referral, Jan. 6 panel says

"I have said time and time again that I had no advance knowledge of the events that took place at the Capitol on that day," Stone said. "Any statement, claim, insinuation, or report alleging, or even implying, that I had any involvement in or knowledge, whether advance or contemporaneous, about the commission of any unlawful acts by any person or group in or around the U.S. Capitol or anywhere in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021, is categorically false."

Stone said after his subpoena is served, he'll make a determination on how to proceed after consulting with his attorney.

The committee said Stone was in D.C. on Jan. 5 & 6, spoke at a Jan. 5 rally and was scheduled to speak on Jan. 6. He also sought financial support to pay for his security through a Stop the Steal website, lawmakers said. Stone also made remarks he was planning to "lead a march to the Capitol" from the Ellipse rally, according to the panel.

Before the siege, Stone was a guest at the Willard Hotel, where several prominent Trump allies met in part to plot how to overturn President Biden's election, according to the panel. That hotel meeting and guests are major areas of interest for the committee; Stone joins other subpoenaed guests who were also at the hotel, including former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, attorney John Eastman, ex-national security adviser Michael Flynn and Bernard Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner who was later sent to prison and then pardoned by Donald Trump.

 

Jan. 6 panel issues new wave of subpoenas for ex-Trump officials

 

The panel says its focus on Jones, the controversial Austin, Texas figure, is tied to his help organizing the rally at the Ellipse before the riot on Jan. 6. Jones claimed to facilitate a donation that covered significant funding for the event, and spoke at a Jan. 6 event at Freedom Plaza.

Jones claimed he was told by the Trump White House that he was to lead a march from the Jan. 6th Ellipse rally to the Capitol. Jones was also a key figure in the spread of false election fraud claims.

Monday evening, Jones issued a statement through his website claiming he was "trying to stop" the Capitol riot.

Court fight over release of Trump documents continues

Monday's demands comes on the same day the committee and the National Archives responded to Trump's arguments to an appellate court to stop a release of Jan. 6-related documents. Trump appealed a district court ruling earlier this month that would have sent hundreds of pages of records to the committee.

The lawsuit came after Biden had waived executive privilege over Trump documents.

Last week, Trump's legal team filed a brief before the U.S. Court of Appeals in the D.C. Circuit arguing a dispute between a former and sitting president highlights the critical concerns over executive privilege. Another ruling in favor of the committee, Trump argued, would have a direct impact on the advice Biden and future presidents can obtain without fear of public disclosure.

But the defendants in the case, the committee and the National Archives, slammed those claims. For example, the legal team for the committee said Trump failed to demonstrate how withholding the documents would harm the office of the presidency.

"The only harm that Mr. Trump asserts is that the release of the requested records will compromise the interests of the Executive Branch," the committee said in its filing on Monday. But "that assertion of harm is far outweighed by the surpassing public interest in a complete and timely investigation of the attack on the Capitol, as President Biden has determined."

With an expedited schedule in place, the appellate court is set to hear oral arguments in the case next week, on Tuesday, Nov. 30.

 

ATTACHMENT FOUR – FROM the ASSOCIATED PRESS

 

WHO HAS THE JAN. 6 PANEL SUBPOENAED — AND WHY?

 

By MARY CLARE JALONICK  November 12, 2021

 

WASHINGTON (AP) — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection has issued almost three dozen subpoenas as it aggressively seeks information about the origins of the attack and what former President Donald Trump did — or didn’t do — to stop it.

The panel is exploring several paths simultaneously, demanding testimony from Trump’s inner circle about his actions that day as well as from outside advisers who organized the rally he spoke at the morning of Jan. 6 and allies who strategized about how to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory. They are also turning toward former Vice President Mike Pence’s orbit and questioning witnesses about efforts to pressure him to stop the congressional electoral count.

The committee is expected to issue more subpoenas as some witnesses, especially those closest to Trump, have indicated they won’t comply or refused to answer questions. But lawmakers on the panel have already talked to more than 150 people, most of them voluntarily, about what led up to the violent siege by Trump’s supporters.

While the committee doesn’t have the power to charge or otherwise punish anyone for their actions, the seven Democrats and two Republicans on the panel say they hope to build the most comprehensive record yet of what happened when hundreds of Trump’s supporters brutally pushed past police and broke into the Capitol, interrupting the certification of Biden’s victory.

A look at who the committee has subpoenaed, and what is to come in the panel’s investigation:

TRUMP’S INNER CIRCLE

The committee’s first subpoenas in late September went to four men who were among his most loyal allies: former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, former White House strategist Steve Bannon, longtime communications aide Daniel Scavino and Kashyap Patel, a White House national security aide who had moved to the Pentagon in the weeks after Trump lost the election.

Bannon immediately told the panel he wouldn’t cooperate, citing a letter from Trump’s lawyer claiming that his conversations should be privileged and shielded from the public. The committee balked at that reasoning and the House voted to hold Bannon in contempt. The Justice Department on Friday indicted Bannon on two counts of contempt of Congress.

Meadows could also be held in contempt after he refused to comply with a subpoena and appear for a deposition. A lawyer for Meadows said his client has a “sharp legal dispute” with the committee and the matter will need to be resolved in court.

The House has since subpoenaed several other well-known members of Trump’s circle, including former press secretary Kayleigh McEnany and top aides Stephen Miller and Jason Miller. The committee said all three participated in efforts to spread false information and may have been with Trump as the attack unfolded — a key area of investigation, as little is still known about what he did to try to stop it.

PENCE’S ORBIT

The committee has also moved to find out more about the effort to pressure former Vice President Mike Pence, who presided over the certification and resisted aggressive attempts from Trump and many of his allies to get him to try to upend the official process in Trump’s favor.

The panel has subpoenaed Keith Kellogg, who was Pence’s national security adviser, writing in the subpoena that he was with Trump as the attack unfolded and may “have direct information about the former president’s statements about, and reactions to, the Capitol insurrection.” The committee wrote that according to several accounts, Kellogg urged Trump to send out a tweet aimed at helping to control the crowd.

Pence’s former spokeswoman Alyssa Farah has spoken to Republican committee members Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and provided documents, according to a person familiar with the conversations who requested anonymity to discuss the confidential conversations. In a series of tweets on Jan. 6, Farah urged Trump to condemn the riots as they were happening and call on his supporters to stand down. “Condemn this now, @realDonaldTrump,” she tweeted. “You are the only one they will listen to. For our country!”

The committee is likely to have interest in talking to more of Pence’s aides, many of whom were frustrated at how the vice president was treated as Trump publicly urged him to try to overturn the count — a power he did not legally have — even after the rioting started. Some of the rioters chanted Pence’s name as they broke into the Capitol and called for his hanging.

THE STRATEGISTS

The panel on Monday subpoenaed several of Trump’s associates who were closely involved in his efforts to overturn the election and who huddled in a so-called “war room” leading up to the siege.

Those Trump allies include lawyer John Eastman; former national security adviser Michael Flynn; Bernard Kerik, who the committee says paid for hotel rooms that served as command centers ahead of Jan. 6; Bill Stepien, manager of Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign; and Angela McCallum, national executive assistant to Trump’s campaign.

In the letter to Flynn — who twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and was pardoned by Trump — the committee cited a December 2020 meeting at which Flynn and other participants “discussed seizing voting machines, declaring a national emergency, invoking certain national security emergency powers and continuing to spread the message that the Nov. 2020 election had been tainted by widespread fraud.”

Eastman, too, strategized about how to overturn Biden’s legitimate win and reached out to states.

OTHER WHITE HOUSE AIDES

On Tuesday, the panel subpoenaed multiple White House aides. Some were top aides and others were lower or mid-level staff who may have witnessed Trump’s activities as the rioting escalated.

The White House aides subpoenaed were personal assistant Nicholas Luna, who the panel said may have witnessed a phone call from Trump to Pence pressuring him not to certify Biden’s win; special assistant Molly Michael, who the committee said sent information about election fraud to “various individuals at the direction of President Trump”; and deputy assistant Ben Williamson, a senior adviser to Meadows.

Also subpoenaed were deputy chief of staff Christopher Liddell, who was in the White House on Jan. 6 and considered resigning, according to reports; and personnel director John McEntee and special assistant Cassidy Hutchinson, who the committee said were also in the White House and at the rally that day.

JUSTICE DEPARTMENT

The panel this week also subpoenaed former Justice Department official Kenneth Klukowski, who Thompson said communicated with Jeffrey Clark, a former assistant attorney general, about a letter Clark had drafted urging officials in Georgia to delay certification of the voting results in that state because of purported fraud.

The letter said Clark and Klukowski spoke before a Jan. 3 meeting at the White House in which Trump openly contemplated replacing acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen with Clark. Rosen and other leaders at the department had pushed back on the false fraud claims.

The committee subpoenaed Clark in October, and he appeared for a deposition last week but declined to testify, partly based on Trump’s claims of executive privilege.

RALLY ORGANIZERS

As part of its probe into the origins of the Jan. 6 riot, one focus of the panel has been the massive Trump rally on the National Mall that was held that morning and went on even after the Capitol breach began.

Included on a list of 11 subpoenas in September were Amy and Kylie Kremer, founders of Women for America First, a group that helped organize the rally; Cynthia Chafian, an organizer who submitted the first permit for the rally; Caroline Wren, who the committee says was listed on permit paperwork for the Jan. 6 rally as a “VIP Advisor”; and Maggie Mulvaney, who the panel says was listed on the permit as “VIP Lead.”

Several of those connected to the rally have cooperated.

 

ATTACHMENT FIVE – From Newsweek

 

STEVE BANNON WANTED CULTURE WAR TO CHANGE U.S. POLITICS, SAYS WHISTLEBLOWER

BY DAMIEN SHARKOV ON 5/17/18 AT 5:50 AM EDT

President Donald Trump's former chief strategist Steve Bannon used private data collected online to stoke and fight a "culture war," an ex-employee at data firm Cambridge Analytica has claimed.

Bannon was once vice president of the firm, an offshoot of British company SCL, which specialized in the collection of data and the creation of strategies to change public behavior. Cambridge Analytica announced its closure last month, following damaging allegations about misuse of social media data, and one of the men behind the accusations said promoting conflict was Bannon's goal in using the company's resources.

"[Bannon] sees cultural warfare as the means to create enduring change in American politics," Christopher Wylie, a whistleblower from SCL, told the Senate on Wednesday (via Reuters). "It was for this reason Mr. Bannon engaged SCL, a foreign military contractor, to build an arsenal of informational weapons he could deploy on the American population."

"Steve Bannon is a follower of something called the 'Breitbart doctrine,' which posits that politics is downstream from culture. So if you want any lasting or enduring changes in politics you have to focus on the culture," Wylie added, according to CBS News. "When Steve Bannon uses the term 'culture war,' he uses that term pointedly and they were seeking out companies that could build an arsenal of informational weapons to fight that war."

Wylie left the organization in 2014 and said that part of what informed his decision were alleged talks at the company about exploiting racial tensions ahead of the 2016 election, employing tactics to dissuade communities from voting at all.

"One of the things that did provoke me to leave was the beginnings of discussions of voter disengagement, I have seen documents reference and I recall conversations that it was intended to focus on African-American voters," Wylie said.

"The company learned that there were segments of the population that responded to messages like 'drain the swamp' or images of border walls or indeed paranoia about the 'deep state' that weren't necessarily reflected in mainstream polling or mainstream political discourse," Wylie said.

Wylie has repeatedly spoken out about the alleged transgressions he saw at the company, in the lead-up to both the election and his departure, including Bannon's involvement in it. The ex-Trump aide, who was fired last year, approved spending nearly $1 million to acquire data that included Facebook profile information, Wiley told The Washington Post in March.

How legitimate the data collection practices were has become the subject of a wider debate about online privacy, as Facebook stated last month that it believes the data of 87 million of its users was improperly shared by Cambridge Analytica. The company's activities are currently the subject of investigations in the U.S. and Europe.

 

 

ATTACHMENT SIX – From THE AUSTIN-AMERICAN STATESMAN

 

JUDGE ORDERS DRUG, ALCOHOL TESTS FOR ALEX JONES IN CHILD CUSTODY CASE

By Jonathan Tilove

 

State District Judge Lora Livingston on Wednesday ordered conspiracy theorist and Infowars host Alex Jones to undergo drug and alcohol testing by noon Thursday and to appear in court for a March 23 hearing on whether two of his children should be placed in the care of his ex wife.

Jones’ attorney David Minton said that his client, who was not present for the late afternoon hearing, had important meetings Thursday morning and asked if he could have until 5 p.m. to get the testing done.

“I’m guessing there is nothing more important than his kids,” Livingston said, insisting that the 10 panel hair follicle test for a broad array of drugs and an EtG Test for alcohol be done by the noon deadline.

Livingston issued the orders at a hearing on an emergency motion filed by Kelly Jones, Alex Jones’ ex wife and the mother of their three children. She seeks to have their two daughters, ages 12 and 15, removed from what she alleges is an unsafe situation in the home of her ex-husband and his second wife, Erika Wulff Jones, whom he married in 2017 and with whom he has another child.

“I want (Alex Jones and his wife) here in front of me on Monday morning, the 23rd,” said Livingston in her mostly empty third-floor courtroom in the Herman Marion Sweatt Travis County Courthouse.

Alex Jones is best known as the impresario of the InfoWars conspiracy theory show, on which he appears daily.

He is also the defendant in four lawsuits — for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress — filed in Austin by the parents of some of the children killed in a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in December 2012. Jones and InfoWars repeatedly depicted the massacre as a hoax.

Those cases, which have drawn national and international attention, may come to trial in the same courthouse in downtown Austin later this year.

Kelly Jones’ motion followed her ex-huband’s arrest late Monday by a Travis County sheriff’s deputy for driving while intoxicated, but also Wulff Jones’ arrest in August by an Austin police officer on the same charge.

In both cases, the arrests resulted from one spouse talking to police about the other.

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Alex Jones’ arrest came after Wulff Jones called authorities. She said they had an argument at home that at one point got physical and that he might be driving intoxicated.

Wulff Jones’ arrest in August came after a private investigator working for her husband called police to say that he was worried about her mental state. The InfoWars host confirmed to police that concern and said she might be driving drunk.

In her order, Livingston required that Alex Jones not drink when he has custody of the girls, or for 12 hours before a visit. She also ordered Alex Jones to make sure Wulff Jones doesn’t drink while the girls are with the couple and that she doesn’t drive them anywhere in any case.

Even though Kelly Jones is seeking to remove the girls from her ex husband’s home as soon as possible, Livingston decided that she was not going rule on the request before the March 23 hearing because the girls were already scheduled to be with their mother as of Friday for a spring break trip to Florida that goes through March 22. Livingston said the girls could be with their mother beginning Thursday if they chose to.

Wednesday’s hearing was only the latest legal skirmishing between Alex Jones and his ex wife over custody of their children since their divorce in 2015.

They were awarded joint custody after a jury trial in 2017 and, for the first time since their divorce, Kelly Jones gained the right to have the two girls and their 17-year-old brother primarily live with her.

That never happened. The former couple were due back in court for a two-week jury trial to begin on March 23 over the terms of their custody arrangement. That trial has now been indefinitely postponed.

After his arrest Monday, Alex Jones was charged with driving while intoxicated even though his blood alcohol content, in two breathalyzer tests, was just below the legal limit of 0.08. It’s not uncommon for people in Texas to be charged with DWI even when their alcohol level is below the legal limit as the law allows prosecutors to use other elements to prove their case, such as a driver’s performance on a field sobriety test and the presence of alcohol odor.

According to an arrest affidavit for Alex Jones, a sheriff’s deputy responded at 10:10 p.m. Monday to a disturbance report from their western Travis County residence.

Wulff Jones had told the dispatcher that she and her husband were in a verbal fight that had been physical earlier in the day and that he had left their home in a black Dodge Charger and that he may have been drinking.

While en route to the residence, the deputy saw a dark Dodge leaving the neighborhood, traveling 45 mph in a 40 mph zone.

The deputy pulled the vehicle over and interviewed Alex Jones, who the officer reported had a strong odor of alcohol.

According to the affidavit, Alex Jones told the deputy he and his wife had had dinner at Izumi Sushi and that he had consumed a bottle of sake around 8 p.m. He said they got into an argument at dinner and he ended up walking three miles back to his home. When he arrived, he said, they resumed arguing. He got into his car to drive to another residence he owns downtown to “get away from his wife,” the affidavit stated.

But on his show on InfoWars Tuesday, Jones offered a somewhat different version of events, describing his return home after dinner and before departing as a relaxing interlude.

“I’ve been in a hot tub, I’ve been doing other things too, you know, with the old lady,” he said. “I was relaxed. I was tired. I went out to get Blue Bell ice cream.”

Travis County Attorney David Escamilla has yet to decide whether to prosecute Jones.

According to the police affidavit in Wulff Jones’ arrest, late on the evening of Aug. 21, a private investigator working for Alex Jones was tailing her when he called police and said he was worried about her mental state. Police then called Alex Jones, who said he feared his wife was intoxicated.

When Austin police pulled her over to check on her condition, she appeared to be inebriated, according to the affidavit. At first she denied having consumed any alcohol but then said she had had a glass of wine. Her preliminary breath test came in at 0.185, far exceeding the legal limit.

Wulff Jones is due in court for a pretrial hearing on her case on April 7.

Livingston said she was eager to get to the “root causes” of the conflict between the Joneses with regard to their children at the March 23 hearing.

“We need to get to the bottom of this,” Livingston said.

 

 

ATTACHMENT SEVEN - From the New Yorker

 

The Dirty Trickster

Campaign tips from the man who has done it all.

 

By Jeffrey Toobin, June 2, 2008

Asign inside the front door of Miami Velvet, a night club of sorts in a warehouse-style building a few minutes from the airport, states, “If sexual activity offends you in any way, do not enter the premises.” At first glance, though, the scene inside looks like a nineteen-eighties disco, with a bar, Madonna at high volume, flashing lights, a stripper’s pole, and a dancer’s cage. But a flat-screen television on the wall plays porn videos, and many clubgoers disappear into locker rooms and emerge wearing towels. From there, some of them go into a lounge, a Jacuzzi room, or one of about half a dozen private rooms to have sex—with their dates or with new acquaintances. Miami Velvet is the leading “swingers’ club” in Miami, and Roger Stone took me there to explain the role he may have played in the fall of Eliot Spitzer, the former governor of New York.

For nearly forty years, Stone has hovered around Republican and national politics, both near the center and at the periphery. At times, mostly during the Reagan years, he was a political consultant and lobbyist who, in conventional terms, was highly successful, working for such politicians as Bob Dole and Tom Kean. Even then, though, Stone regularly crossed the line between respectability and ignominy, and he has become better known for leading a colorful personal life than for landing big-time clients. Still, it is no coincidence that Stone materialized in the midst of the Spitzer scandal—and that he had memorable cameos in the last two Presidential elections. While the Republican Party usually claims Ronald Reagan as its inspiration, Stone represents the less discussed but still vigorous legacy of Richard Nixon, whose politics reflected a curious admixture of anti-Communism, social moderation, and tactical thuggery. Stone believes that Nixonian hardball, more than sunny Reaganism, is John McCain’s only hope for the Presidency.

Over the years, Stone’s relationships with colleagues and clients have been so combustible that his value as a messenger has been compromised. Stone worked for Donald Trump as an occasional lobbyist and as an adviser when Trump considered running for President in 2000. “Roger is a stone-cold loser,” Trump told me. “He always tries taking credit for things he never did.” Like Nixon, Stone is also a great hater—of, among others, the Clintons, Karl Rove, and Spitzer. So what happened at Miami Velvet one night last September, he said, amounted to a gift.

“She was sitting right over there,” Stone told me, pointing to a seat at the bar, as we sipped vodka from plastic cups. (Miami Velvet is B.Y.O.B., to avoid the trouble of securing a liquor license, so Stone had brought along a bottle of the brand p.i.n.k.) “We were just having a casual conversation, and I told her I was a dentist,” Stone said. “She told me she was a call girl, but she wasn’t working that night.” Miami Velvet prohibits prostitution on the premises, a point that is emphasized in the four-page single-spaced legal waiver that everyone must sign to be admitted. (Another house rule, which is reinforced by signs on the wall, is “No means no.”) “She told me she had a very high-end clientele—she kept using the word ‘high-end’—athletes, international businessmen, politicians,” Stone said.

“ ‘Like who?’ I asked her,” Stone went on. “She named a couple of sports guys, some car dealers I’d heard of because of their commercials, and then she said, ‘I almost had a date with Eliot Spitzer, the governor of New Jersey.’ ” Stone laughed. “She didn’t know much about politics. So I asked her, ‘Did this guy have a beard?’ ” (Jon Corzine, the governor of New Jersey, has a beard.) No, the woman said, he was a skinny bald guy—a description that fit Spitzer. According to Stone, the woman told him that Spitzer had reached her through her escort service, which listed her as a brunette, but she had dyed her hair blond. So the agency referred the governor to a dark-haired colleague, the woman said, who met up with Spitzer in Miami.

“I asked her what her friend said about Spitzer,” Stone told me. “She said he was nice enough, but the only odd thing was that he kept his socks on. They were the kind that went to the middle of the calf, and one of them kept falling down.”

Stone said that he decided, after hearing the story, to keep the conversation with the woman to himself for the moment. But there was never any doubt that he would eventually deploy it. As Stone puts it in one of the many rules he lives by, “He who speaks first, loses.”

Stone spends most of his time in Miami these days, but he’s still greeted warmly by the staff at the “21” Club, the venerable former speakeasy on West Fifty-second Street. “I love it here,” Stone said, as we settled into a corner table. “It’s like time stopped in about 1975 in here—my kind of place.” What appeals to Stone is not just the red-meat-and-red-wine gastronomy but also the jackets-required formality. Stone has had his suits tailor-made since the nineteen-seventies, partly because he has a bodybuilder’s physique, which makes it difficult to buy clothes off the rack, but also because he is fastidious about what he wears. He owns more than a hundred suits. For many years, he bleached his hair to an almost fluorescent yellow, but he now keeps it a more banal brown. For dinner, he wore a chalk-striped double-breasted suit, a starched white shirt with a spread collar, and a silver-colored tie, and, outside the restaurant, a homburg. His outfit comported with two of the rules in his book, “Stone’s Rules for War, Politics, Food, Fashion, and Living,” which he hopes to publish soon: “Never wear a double-breasted suit and a button-down collar” and “White dress shirts after six.”

Stone ordered a Stolichnaya Martini. “The key to a good Martini is you have to marinate the olives in vermouth first,” he said. “Nixon gave me the recipe. He said he got it from Winston Churchill.”

 

Stone believes that Nixonian hardball, more than sunny Reaganism, is John McCain’s only hope for the Presidency.

Stone did not grow up in such rarefied company. He was born in 1952, half Italian and half Hungarian, and was raised in Lewisboro, New York. His mother wrote for the local newspaper, and his father dug wells. Before he was a teen-ager, a neighbor gave him a copy of Barry Goldwater’s book “The Conscience of a Conservative,” and Stone was hooked. In 1965, when he was thirteen, Stone was taking the train into New York to work weekends on behalf of the ill-fated mayoral campaign of William F. Buckley, Jr. “The key thing about Lewisboro is that it is just across the border from New Canaan,” Stone said, referring to the wealthy Connecticut suburb. “So early on I saw myself as living in kind of a bridge between two cultures, the white working class and the white upper class.” In Stone’s political world view, both groups are, or ought to be, united in opposition to the meddling hand of government.

Stone moved to Washington to attend George Washington University, but he became so engrossed in Republican politics that he never graduated. He was just nineteen when he played a bit part in the Watergate scandals. He adopted the pseudonym Jason Rainier and made contributions in the name of the Young Socialist Alliance to the campaign of Pete McCloskey, who was challenging Nixon for the Republican nomination in 1972. Stone then sent a receipt to the Manchester Union Leader, to “prove” that Nixon’s adversary was a left-wing stooge. Stone hired another Republican operative, who was given the pseudonym Sedan Chair II, to infiltrate the McGovern campaign. Stone’s Watergate high jinks were revealed during congressional hearings in 1973, and the news cost Stone his job on the staff of Senator Robert Dole. Stone then moved into the world of political consulting, to which he was temperamentally better suited than government service. He co-founded the National Conservative Political Action Committee, which spent money in support of candidates, including Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, and Dan Quayle, in Indiana, who were instrumental in the G.O.P. takeover of the Senate.

Stone revels in his Watergate pedigree, noting almost apologetically that he was never accused of breaking any law. “The Democrats were weak, we were strong,” he told me. (Stone’s rules: “Attack, attack, attack—never defend” and “Admit nothing, deny everything, launch counterattack.”) In Nixon’s later years, Stone organized a series of dinners at the former President’s home in New Jersey, where groups of journalists would listen to the great man’s monologues about world events. “Of course a lot of the journalists hated Nixon, but they were always blown away by how smart he was,” Stone said.

It was Stone’s preoccupation with toughness that led to his enduring affection for Nixon. “The reason I’m a Nixonite is because of his indestructibility and resilience,” Stone said. “He never quit. His whole career was all built around his personal resentment of élitism. It was the poor-me syndrome. John F. Kennedy’s father bought him his House seat, his Senate seat, and the Presidency. No one bought Nixon anything. Nixon resented that. He was very class-conscious. He identified with the people who ate TV dinners, watched Lawrence Welk, and loved their country.” (Rule: “When I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my revolver.”)

Although Stone shares many of Nixon’s resentments, his own tastes have always tended to more Rabelaisian pleasures than “champagne music” and Salisbury steak. Not long ago, Stone went to the Ink Monkey tattoo shop in Venice Beach and had a portrait of Nixon’s face applied to his back, right below the neck. “Women love it,” Stone said.

Nixon recognized the effectiveness of anti-élitism—a staple of American campaigns even today—as a core message. “Everybody talks about the Reagan Democrats who helped put the Republican Party over the top, but they were really the Nixon Democrats. The exodus of working-class people from the Democratic Party was started by Nixon. The realignment was delayed by Watergate, but it was really Nixon who figured out how to win,” Stone said. “We had a non-élitist message. We were the party of the workingman! We wanted lower taxes for everyone, across the board. They were the party of the Hollywood élite.” Stone went on, “The point that the Democrats missed was that the people who weren’t rich wanted to be rich. And Jimmy Carter was viewed as an appeaser.” (Rule: “The Democrats are the party of slavery; the Republicans are the party of freedom.”)

Hank Sheinkopf, the veteran Democratic political consultant, who has known Stone for many years, values his political insights. “He was able to use the Democratic teachings on voter turnout and class warfare and turn it against us,” Sheinkopf told me. “He knew what populism was in reverse. He thought like a Democrat and dressed like a plutocrat. He once said to me, ‘Are you black? Are you Hispanic? Are you gay?’ When I said no, he said, ‘Then why the fuck are you a Democrat? You should be with us.’ ”

Stone detests Hillary Clinton’s politics but admires her pugnacity. He wrote recently on his Web site, an erratically updated collection of observations called Stonezone.com, “I must admit she has demonstrated true grit and Nixonian-like tenacity in the face of adversity.” Stone particularly admires Clinton’s attempt to hang the “élitist” tag on Barack Obama. “It’s a good idea,” he said.

In 1976, Stone was named national youth director for Reagan’s first, failed run for the Republican nomination. Four years later, after serving on various young-Republican task forces, Stone asked the leaders of Reagan’s next campaign for the toughest assignment they had. They made Stone, who was in his late twenties, political director of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. The region hardly looked like Reagan country, but Stone found a new mentor to help him. “I was invited to a party by a socialite named Sheila Mosler, and Roy Cohn was there,” Stone said, as the captain delivered an order of “21” ’s steak tartare. “Roy was a Democrat, but he was an anti-Communist and a master of public relations, and he wanted to help me with Reagan. He told me to come see him at his town house.

“When I got there, Roy was in his bathrobe, eating three strips of bacon burned to a crisp and both halves of a devilled egg,” Stone went on. “He started telling me how he was going to help me set up the Reagan campaign—everything from union endorsements to office space. He told me to ride down to the courthouse with him. He had a young lawyer with him, and it was clear that Roy knew nothing about the case he was going to argue. But he knew it didn’t matter. He used to say, ‘Don’t tell me the law. Tell me the judge.’ Roy knew how the world worked.” Following Cohn’s lead, Stone played hardball for Reagan, challenging George H. W. Bush’s New York primary delegates on a variety of technical grounds, getting many of them disqualified. A couple of years later, Cohn threw Stone a thirtieth-birthday party in a private room at “21.”

Like Stone, Cohn combined conservative politics with an outré personal life. “Roy was not gay,” Stone told me. “He was a man who liked having sex with men. Gays were weak, effeminate. He always seemed to have these young blond boys around. It just wasn’t discussed. He was interested in power and access. He told me his absolute goal was to die completely broke and owing millions to the I.R.S. He succeeded in that.” Cohn was a role model for Stone. “I’m a total Republican, but I’ve never claimed to be a Christian-right conservative. They’re a large but dwindling part of the Party. We need to get suburban moderates back. Fiscal conservatives and social moderates have been drummed out of the Party. Fiscal conservatives are the glue that holds the Party together. Social issues, unfortunately, do nothing but put voters out of reach for us.” (Rule: “Folks want to get government out of the boardroom and the bedroom.”)

Stone did not enter the government after Reagan won the election. Instead, he started a political-consulting and lobbying firm with several co-workers from the campaign. The name of the operation went through several iterations, but it was perhaps best known as Black, Manafort, Stone & Atwater, the latter being Lee Atwater, who had worked briefly in the Reagan White House’s political office. The partners made their money by charging blue-chip corporate clients such as Ronald Perelman’s MacAndrews & Forbes and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. large fees to lobby their former campaign colleagues, many of whom had moved into senior posts in the new Administration. There were also less savory clients—Zaire’s Mobuto Sese Seko, Angola’s unita rebels, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos. Stone and his wife at the time, Ann, became famous for their lavish life style, which included a chauffeur-driven Mercedes and tailor-made clothes. They threw raucous parties for no reason or for almost no reason, like Calvin Coolidge’s birthday.

To some people, the idea that Reagan’s former campaign operatives would become lobbyists was shocking. In 1985, in what reads like a charming period piece from a vanished era, Jacob Weisberg wrote a profile of Stone in The New Republic, which bore the headline “State-of-the-Art Sleazeball.” Weisberg said that Stone and his colleagues “have abandoned helping Reagan make conservative ideals reality in order to sell their connections to the highest bidders—whether in service of those ideals or not.” Now such connections are so common as to scarcely merit comment. For example, Charles Black ran BKSH & Associates, the successor firm to that original venture, until he took a leave to manage John McCain’s campaign for President. And the firm is now a subsidiary of the public-relations conglomerate Burson-Marsteller, whose chief executive is Mark Penn, an adviser to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. “So what that means is that Mark Penn is Charlie Black’s boss,” Stone told me. “And they said I was sleazy.” (Black has since resigned from BKSH.)

Stone never much cared for corporate lobbying—or for being part of any large organization—so he stuck to campaign work more than his partners did. (Rule: “No one ever built a statue to a committee.”) In 1981, Stone ran his first major campaign on his own, Tom Kean’s race for governor of New Jersey against the Democrat Jim Florio. Kean won in a recount.

During the Reagan years in Washington, Stone began cultivating in earnest the image of a lovable rogue. Then, as now, some colleagues and clients found Stone’s affectations tiresome, at best. Ed Rollins, who served as President Reagan’s first political director, said, “Roger was a fringe player around town. He always had this reputation of being a guy who exaggerated things, who pretended he did things. Roger was never on Nixon’s staff, was never on the White House staff. I don’t think you’ll find anyone in the business who trusts him. Roger was always a little rat.”

According to Douglas Schoen, a co-founder of the Penn, Schoen & Berland polling firm, with whom Stone has worked on political campaigns over the years, and who regards Stone as a friend, “He’s not so much a Republican as an actor who likes to assume poses. The show is not a by-product of his life—it is his life.” Hank Sheinkopf remains on good terms with Stone, but recognizes his ability to alienate both allies and adversaries. “He wreaks havoc in his wake,” he told me. “When he’s on, he’s the best, but he is really more about his life than his work. I went tie-shopping with him once, down at the old Barneys, on Seventh Avenue, and it was one of the most memorable experiences of my life. It was a time in his life when he was obsessed with Alan Flusser suits and great ties. He bought about ten of the most beautiful and expensive ties I’d ever seen. But he’s moved on. Now he’s into watch fobs and hats.”

In 1988, Stone worked as a senior consultant to George H. W. Bush’s successful campaign against Michael Dukakis, which was managed by Lee Atwater. The experience prompts a rare disclaimer from Stone, who is usually eager to claim credit for hardball tactics. “We had an ad running about the furloughs in Massachusetts, with a revolving door, and it was really polling well—a great ad—and none of the prisoners were identifiable,” Stone told me. “But then Atwater came in with this version that had Willie Horton’s picture—and he said they were going to have an independent group put it on the air.” (Horton was a convicted murderer who committed a rape after fleeing while on furlough from prison in Massachusetts while Dukakis was governor.) “I told Atwater that it was a mistake, that we were winning the issue without having to resort to this racist crap. I told Atwater, ‘You are going to get linked to this, and it is gonna follow you and George Bush for the rest of your life.’ It did.” (Atwater died of a brain tumor in 1991. Other campaign officials told me that they were not in a position to know what Stone said to Atwater about the Horton ad.) For all his bravado, Stone told me that he shied away from racially inflammatory campaign work. He says frequently, “You know, Nixon was the one who desegregated the schools—not that he ever got any credit for it.”

After Bush, Sr.,’s victory, Stone returned to his firm, mixing corporate clients and occasional political consulting. He worked on three campaigns for Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican. He developed a specialty in ballot initiatives, especially about gaming. (Stone doesn’t gamble. “The odds are stacked,” he told me. “It’s a loser’s game.”) Stone came to prefer working on these kinds of race. “I do a lot of referendums,” he said. “They can’t talk back. They don’t have wives. They don’t have friends who tell you how to run the campaign. They are supported by special interests, so there’s a lot of money in them.” (Rule: “There is only one party—the Green Party.”) In the nineties, Stone divorced Ann and married Nydia Bertran, whose father had been a diplomat in pre-Castro Cuba. His wife, whom he invariably refers to as “Mrs. Stone,” had family ties in south Florida, and the couple began spending time in Miami.

Stone served as a senior consultant to Bob Dole’s 1996 campaign for President, but that assignment ended in a characteristic conflagration. The National Enquirer, in a story headlined “Top Dole Aide Caught in Group-Sex Ring,” reported that the Stones had apparently run personal ads in a magazine called Local Swing Fever and on a Web site that had been set up with Nydia’s credit card. “Hot, insatiable lady and her handsome body builder husband, experienced swingers, seek similar couples or exceptional muscular . . . single men,” the ad on the Web site stated. The ads sought athletes and military men, while discouraging overweight candidates, and included photographs of the Stones. At the time, Stone claimed that he had been set up by a “very sick individual,” but he was forced to resign from Dole’s campaign. Stone acknowledged to me that the ads were authentic. “When that whole thing hit the fan in 1996, the reason I gave a blanket denial was that my grandparents were still alive,” he said. “I’m not guilty of hypocrisy. I’m a libertarian and a libertine.”

When I arrived in Miami, Stone suggested that we meet for lunch at Versailles, a Cuban restaurant on Calle Ocho, in the heart of the city’s émigré community. Stone strolled in wearing a perfectly pressed white linen shirt and a panama hat. In his customary defiance of medical convention, Stone makes sure that his skin is bronzed by the sun twelve months a year. (Rule: “White shirt + tan face = confidence.”) He ordered a triple espresso, one of four or so he drinks every day.

When I asked why he moved to Miami, Stone quoted a Somerset Maugham line: “It’s a sunny place for shady people. I fit right in.” After leaving Black, Manafort, in the mid-nineties, Stone had operated on his own, hopping from project to project. He ran one of the quixotic independent bids for New York governor of the billionaire Tom Golisano; helped defeat a pro-environment voter initiative in Florida, in 1996; and ran a political campaign in Ukraine. (“I’m the father of the yard sign in Ukraine,” Stone told me. “They say, ‘Comrade is genius.’ ”) He realized that he could establish his base anywhere he wanted. “I could see the smoke billowing from the Pentagon on 9/11, and after that I decided to get the hell out of Washington,” Stone said at lunch. “That’s when I cut my last ties there.”

Stone’s move to Miami seems almost inevitable. The weather facilitates year-round tanning. And the byzantine politics of the city, with anti-Communism at its core, suits Stone’s temperament. “You are at the nexus of Cuban internecine politics, with family rivalries that have carried over from Cuba,” Stone said. “This is the nexus for Colombian politics, also a hotbed for Puerto Rican politics. It’s all going on right here.”

Stone’s knowledge of the peculiar world of Miami led to what may be his most enduring political legacy—his role in the resolution of the 2000 Presidential election. The Enquirer’s disclosures about Stone’s personal life had made him radioactive in terms of a public role in the Presidential race, but when the contest came down to a recount in Florida his talent for hand-to-hand political combat was too useful for senior Republicans to ignore. According to Stone, James A. Baker III, the former Secretary of State, who was leading the Bush forces, told his aide Margaret Tutwiler to recruit Stone. (Baker and Tutwiler say that they don’t remember this, but that it is possible.) “They asked me to go to Palm Beach County, which was where the first big fight was, but I thought I could do more good here in Miami-Dade,” Stone said.

Stone decided to concentrate at first on “the atmospherics,” as he put it, which in Miami means radio. Several Spanish-language stations in the city devoted themselves entirely to talk about politics; no print or television outlets could match their influence. The most powerful of these was Radio Mambi, a fifty-thousand-watt station, whose principal owner and on-air voice was Armando Perez-Roura, a Cuban exile who was known as the Cuban-American community’s Rush Limbaugh. Radio Mambi was Stone’s first stop.

“Latin media is unique in the sense that when you buy advertising you also are buying programming,” Stone told me. “If you buy, you get to supply the guests. So I started buying time, and bringing Mrs. Stone, whose command of the Spanish language is better than mine, around to be the guest. The idea we were putting out there was that this was a left-wing power grab by Gore, the same way Fidel Castro did it in Cuba. We were very explicitly drawing that analogy.” Stone was fortunate, too (as was Bush), because the recount came soon after the Elián González affair, in which the Clinton-Gore Administration enraged many Miami Cubans by agreeing to return Elián, who was six years old, to his father in Cuba. A local political consultant sold Stone a contact list of activists who had been working on the González case. “We used the list to turn out crowds whenever we wanted,” Stone said. “We were telephoning the shit out of all the appropriate demographics.”

After our lunch, Stone summoned his chauffeur-driven Jaguar—he owned four Jaguars at the time—to take us downtown, so that he could walk me through the events that concluded the Miami recount. On November 21, 2000, the Florida Supreme Court gave Gore an important victory by ruling that the deadline for recounts would be extended to November 26th. At that point, the top priority for the Gore forces was to get the recounts up and running, especially in Miami-Dade County, which is the most populous in the state. On the Republican side, according to Stone, “The whole idea behind what they were doing was that there had already been one recount of the votes, so we didn’t want another. The idea was to shut it down, stop the recount here in Miami.” By November 22nd, the recount process had begun, in a conference room on the eighteenth floor of the Stephen P. Clark Government Center, a vast concrete office building on a forlorn plaza in downtown Miami.

The scene in front of the Clark center that morning was volatile—which was, of course, exactly how Stone wanted it. Several thousand mostly pro-Bush protesters had gathered on the sun-baked plaza to insist that the recount be shut down. Early that morning, Perez-Roura, of Radio Mambi, had sent Evilio Cepero, a local activist who sometimes worked for him as a reporter, to broadcast from the scene. Cepero urged Perez-Roura’s listeners to join the protest, addressed the growing crowd with a megaphone, and interviewed supporters, like the local members of Congress Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. Many held signs that said “sore/loserman.” Others chanted, “Remember Elián!”

“We set up a Winnebago trailer, right over here,” Stone said when we got out of the Jaguar and walked about a block away from the Clark center, on First Street. “I set up my command center there. I had walkie-talkies and cell phones, and I was in touch with our people in the building. Our whole idea was to shut the recount down. That was why we were there. We had the frequency to the Democrats’ walkie-talkies and were listening to their communications, but they were so disorganized that we didn’t learn much that was useful.”

A substantial contingent of young Republican Capitol Hill aides, along with such congressmen as John Sweeney, of New York, who had travelled to Miami, joined in the protest. Thanks to this delegation, the events at the Clark center have come to be known as the “Brooks Brothers riot,” but Stone disputes that characterization. “There was a Brooks Brothers contingent, but the crowd in front of the courthouse was largely Spanish,” he said. “Most of the people there were people that we drew to the scene.”

 

At one point on November 22nd, Stone said, he heard from an ally in the building that Gore supporters were trying to remove some ballots from the counting room. “One of my pimply-faced contacts said, ‘Two commissioners have taken two or three hundred ballots to the elevator,’ ” Stone said. “I said, ‘O.K., follow them. Half you guys go on the elevator and half go in the stairs.’ Everyone got sucked up in this. They were trying to keep the doors from being closed. Meanwhile, they were trying to take the rest of the ballots into a back room with no windows. I told our guys to stop them—don’t let them close the door! They are trying to keep the door from being closed. There was a lot of screaming and yelling.” (In fact, the Gore official in the elevator, Joe Geller, was carrying a single sample ballot.) The dual scenes of chaos—both inside and outside the building—prompted the recount officials to stop their work. The recount in Miami was never re-started, depriving Gore of his best chance to catch up in the over-all state tally.

As is customary with Stone, there is some controversy about his precise role. “I was the guy in charge of the trailer, and I coördinated the Brooks Brothers riot,” Brad Blakeman, a lobbyist and political consultant who worked for Bush in Miami, told me. “Roger did not have a role that I know of. His wife may have been on the radio, but I never saw or heard from him.” Scoffing at Blakeman’s account, Stone asserts that he was in the trailer; he said that he had never heard of Blakeman. (Rule: “Lay low, play dumb, keep moving.”)

Four years later, Stone played a similar role in Bush’s reëlection campaign. In September, 2004, CBS News aired what it said were newly discovered documents in a report suggesting that George W. Bush had dodged military service in Vietnam. The authenticity of the documents was quickly challenged, and the focus in the news media shifted to whether CBS had been bamboozled into using forgeries, not whether the charges were true. In a CNN interview, Terry McAuliffe, then the head of the Democratic National Committee, seized on a New York Post item citing a “hot rumor” that Stone—“an old dirty trickster from the Nixon days,” in McAuliffe’s words—had forged the documents, presumably to embarrass CBS and help Bush. It was a measure of Stone’s reputation at that point that a top Democrat had attempted, on such slim evidence, to link him to a campaign transgression.

“It’s so rare that I’m accused of something that I’m not guilty of that I felt I had to respond,” Stone told me. Rather than simply deny his involvement, Stone went on cable news to deepen the controversy and lob his own accusation—equally baseless—that the Democrats were somehow involved with the documents. (A Stone rule, borrowed from Gore Vidal: “Never pass up the opportunity to have sex or be on television.”) In an interview with CNN, Stone said, “The real question here is, what is the complicity of the Kerry campaign, or what did Max Cleland know and when did he know it?” (Cleland, a former senator from Georgia, was an aide to John Kerry.) Recalling the episode, Stone said that his problem with the potentially forged documents was practical, not moral. “It was nuts to think I had anything to do with those documents,” he said. “Those papers were potentially devastating to George Bush. You couldn’t put them out there assuming that they would be discredited. You couldn’t have assumed that this would redound to Bush’s benefit. I believe in bank shots, but that one was too big a risk.” Still, Stone was happy to put his seamy reputation to work for the Republican cause. “I definitely saw the opening to be a good party man,” Stone said. (Rule: “Nothing is on the level.”)

When we first met in Miami, Stone brought along an old friend, Michael Caputo, who has assisted him in various projects over the years. Caputo grew up in upstate New York, where his family runs an insurance business that had a dispute with Eliot Spitzer when he was attorney general. As a form of revenge, Caputo had started two Web sites—spitzerfile.com and newyorkfacts.net—that collected negative press stories about the new governor. With help from a friend who had run computer projects for the Pentagon, Caputo and Stone located the e-mail addresses of many journalists and other prominent people in New York and sent them news of Spitzer’s woes. “The left has done a better job of dominating the new space,” Stone said. “We’re weak on the Web. The whole thing was a labor of love.”

It was, in short, Stone’s idea of entertainment. “I thought Spitzer was punk, and I wanted to fuck with him any way I could,” he said. (Rule: “Hate is a stronger motivator than love.”) By the middle of 2007, his Spitzer bashing had become a business, because Stone was hired in June as a consultant to the New York State Senate Republicans.

On August 6th, someone whose voice sounded a great deal like Stone’s left a message on the office answering machine of Bernard Spitzer, the governor’s eighty-three-year-old father. The caller referred to a possible investigation of loans made by the elder Spitzer to his son’s campaigns. “If you resist this subpoena, you will be arrested and brought to Albany,” said the caller, who went on, “And there is not a goddam thing your phony, psycho, piece-of-shit son can do about it.” Private detectives hired by Bernard Spitzer traced the call to Stone’s wife’s telephone, but Stone, however implausibly, denied leaving the message. At first, he claimed that on the night of the call he had been attending the Broadway show “Frost/Nixon,” but there was no performance that evening. Stone also suggested that his landlord, a Spitzer supporter, had set him up, or that a standup comedian and impressionist had imitated his voice. As a result of the controversy, Stone had to relinquish his position with the State Senate Republicans.

“They caught Roger red-handed lying,” Donald Trump said. “What he did was ridiculous and stupid. I lost respect for Eliot Spitzer when he didn’t sue Roger Stone for doing that to his father, who is a wonderful man.”

The brouhaha over the phone call did little to faze Stone. Some weeks later, he was approached by a pair of F.B.I. agents who may have been in the early stages of an investigation of Spitzer. (Stone says that he doesn’t know why the F.B.I. sought him out.) Stone declined to speak with them, but on November 19, 2007, Stone’s attorney wrote to the agents and recounted the story that the woman had told him at Miami Velvet, including the part about the socks. (“Perhaps you can use this detail to corroborate Mr. Stone’s information,” the letter states.) Four months later, Spitzer resigned, after it was revealed that he was a client of the Emperors Club V.I.P., a prostitution ring.

 

In Stone’s mind, this turn of events suggests that he may have played a key role in forcing Spitzer out of office. (He takes satisfaction in noting that a recent New York Post report about another prostitute allegedly patronized by Spitzer corroborated the claim that he preferred to wear his socks during sex.) But, as is usually the case with Stone, there is ample reason for skepticism. The F.B.I. declined to comment, but it appears that the bureau was investigating Spitzer because of suspicious money transfers, including some that ultimately went to the Emperors Club; Stone’s significance, if any, in that case is hard to assess. Moreover, Roger Portella, the manager of Miami Velvet, told me that his records showed that until our visit earlier this year Stone had not been in the club since 2005. When I asked Stone about this, he said that on the occasion of his conversation with the off-duty prostitute he had come with another Miami Velvet member, and thus did not give his name. “Whether it started with Stone, or he contributed to an ongoing investigation, we have no idea,” a member of the Spitzer camp told me. “There is a lot of crazy stuff around the edges of this case. Stone is one part.”

In any event, in the months leading up to Spitzer’s surprise resignation, Stone did offer his friends cryptic hints of what might be coming. “Roger guaranteed me that Spitzer wouldn’t last,” Douglas Schoen said. “When the call to the father happened, and he was fired, he said, ‘I will last longer than Spitzer will.’ I had no idea what he was talking about at the time—no one thought there was a chance that Eliot was going to lose his job. But of course Roger was right.”

At times, Stone’s real party seems to be the vaudevillian rather than the G.O.P. Earlier this year, Stone created an independent political group, known as a 527, to criticize Hillary Clinton, and he dubbed the organization Citizens United Not Timid. The group had no real operations and existed mostly so that Stone could refer to its acronym. I suggested that this was juvenile. “I thought it up in a bar,” Stone said. “I was having fun!” (Rule: “Get your carbs from booze—not potatoes, rice, pasta, or bread.”) His Jaguar was, at that moment, passing the federal courthouse in Miami, where he had just been sued for trademark infringement by an actual political organization that used the name Citizens United. “It was unbelievable,” Stone told me. “We spent a whole half a day in court on this stupid thing. And at the end of the day I announced that I had a new name: Citizens Uniformly Not Timid.”

Ultimately, the process—the battle—interests Stone more than the result. Four years ago, he says, he gave advice (free) to Al Sharpton during his run for President, seeing in the Reverend a temperamental, if not a political, kindred spirit. And though Stone remains a Republican, he engages in the sport of seemingly hating many members of his own party, whom he regards, he says, as élitists. After his work for Golisano, Stone nursed a grudge against George Pataki, Spitzer’s Republican predecessor, and Stone seems to be gearing up for an anti-Jeb Bush campaign, should the former Florida governor decide to run for President in 2012. “Jeb is waiting in the wings? Over my dead body,” Stone said. “The Bushes have brought us to ruin twice—first 1992 and now. I’ll see you in New Hampshire to stop it. I’ll wait for him.”

For the moment, though, Stone must be content to watch the current Presidential race from the sidelines. His only prior dealing with John McCain was bumpy. “I was doing some lobbying for Trump’s airline in the eighties, and he was competing for landing slots at LaGuardia against America West Airlines, so I went to see McCain about it in his office at the Capitol,” Stone told me. “I made an offhand comment that it wasn’t surprising that he was backing America West, because they were based in Phoenix. He stood up and said, ‘What the fuck are you talking about? Get the fuck out of my office!’ But I didn’t take it personally. I supported him in 2000, and I support him now.”

McCain’s route to victory, Stone believes, is a Nixonian slash-and-burn campaign against Barack Obama, the likely Democratic nominee. “Obama and his wife are élitists and they’re weak,” Stone told me. “They don’t share middle-class values. Middle-class Americans are proud of their country, and they are not. He thinks he’s going to sit down with Iran and Hamas. How do you know he’s not going to shake hands with a suicide bomber? You can’t sit down with people who don’t want to sit down. All he’s going to do is raise taxes, which is going to give the government more money but it’s not going to create any jobs.” Stone added, “McCain himself should not run a slash-and-burn campaign, but a slash-and-burn campaign will have to be run by others.” (Rule: “Use a cutout.”)

When Stone talks about politics, formulating arguments that candidates can use, he tends to ramp his voice up to a snarl, the way that the message on Bernard Spitzer’s answering machine sounded. It’s like an actor running lines. But, when he switches back to an analytical mode, Stone immediately turns cheerful, full of love for the game. “Remember,” Stone said. “Politics is not about uniting people. It’s about dividing people. And getting your fifty-one per cent.” (Stone’s rule: “The only thing worse in politics than being wrong is being boring.”) ♦

Published in the print edition of the June 2, 2008, issue.

 

ATTACHMENT EIGHT – FROM the Little Village Magazine (Muscatine, IA)

 

DEMOCRACY IN CRISIS: ROGER STONE ON THE FAILED WAR ON DRUGS AND HIS NIXON-SHAPED BONGS

Posted on Apr 18, 2017 by Baynard Woods

 

Roger Stone has two bongs shaped like his hero, Richard Nixon. “One’s in the shape of his head, the other is kind of more artsy,” he said. “They’re both very cool but they’re a symbol to me that the war on drugs, as waged by Nixon, was a failure. Is a failure.”

Stone, the famous Republican dirty-trickster dandy who first came to public attention when a stunt to discredit a Nixon opponent came to light in the Watergate hearings, is as responsible for Trump’s ascent to the presidency as anyone. He has been urging Trump to run since the late 1980s and was an early manager of last year’s campaign. He saw Nixon’s anti-elitism as key to a future Republican victory — and was proven right when he helped a billionaire ride to the White House on the back of resentment against “the establishment.” He has a long history of racist and sexist remarks and founded an organization — Citizens United Not Timid — so he could call Hillary Clinton a “cunt.”

But of late, in addition to being at the center of the Russia scandal, Stone has been chiding the president for not reigning in Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ outdated ideas about drugs.

 “Sessions comes out of that conservative, southern, old-time tradition,” Stone told me on the phone. “I think he’s quoted as saying, ‘Good people don’t smoke marijuana.’ No, senator, sick people smoke marijuana. And it helps them. More than western medicine sometimes. He has no life experience with that. He could not possibly understand because, you know, within Jeff Sessions’ circle of acquaintances and friends, he probably doesn’t know anyone who smokes marijuana.”

Stone, a snazzy-dressing swinger with a bodybuilding physique and a tattoo of Nixon on his back, is a libertine who might like to toke. But he also sees it as a philosophical issue.

“You can’t be for states’ rights when it comes to transgender bathrooms; you can’t be for states’ rights when to comes to abortion; you can’t be for states’ rights when it comes to medicinal marijuana, and then be against states’ rights when it comes to recreational marijuana,” he said. “Either you’re for states’ rights or you’re not. You’ve got to be consistent.”

For a crafty veteran of about 10 presidential campaigns, it’s a political issue as well.

“I think a lot of younger voters, I think a lot of libertarian-oriented voters — they may not even know that term — but voters who are fiscally conservative but socially progressive, I think they voted for Trump,” Stone said. Among those coming to Trump were pothead supporters of Gary Johnson.

I asked if he had talked to the president about it directly. “I’m gonna duck that question,” he said. “I just don’t want to fuck up my effectiveness, so I’d rather not address it.”

I wondered if Sessions — and by extension, Trump — might want to keep the drug war going for the same reason they started it, according to Nixon aide John Ehrlichman, who told Harper’s reporter Dan Baum that the administration used it to target and demonize its political enemies.

 “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying?” Ehrlichman told Baum in 1994. “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

“I’m not sure if it was as nefarious as Ehrlichman would put it,” Stone said. “I mean, yeah, at the time, the Nixonites, myself included, thought that all hippies smoke marijuana and all hippies were against the war and therefore all hippies were wrong.”

Now he has rethought all of that.

“In retrospect, I — any objective person has to realize that the war on drugs has been one giant, expensive, ignominious failure. We’re incarcerating people, we’re not rehabilitating anyone. We’re destroying lives over non-violent crimes, sometimes first-offense crimes. The whole question of drug abuse should be viewed as a public-health issue, not a criminal issue.”

And to show just how bizarro our political world is now, Stone, the ultimate Nixonian, is not only pro-pot but anti-war (“Anti pointless war when our national interest is not perfectly clear” he later clarified via text). Even if he recognizes some political benefits — including taking the “wind out of” the Russia investigations — to bombing another country, he said that, “going forward, Syria to me is a defining moment.”

“If this extends to a wider war, boots on the ground, saturation bombing, well then, the Trump coalition will fracture, and it will be hard for him to govern.”

Ever conspiracy-minded, Stone wondered if the chemical attack on civilians may have been what conspiracy theorists call a false flag.

“Could the use of chemical weapons in Syria have been a false flag not perpetrated by Assad?” he asked. “Look up Gulf of Tonkin, but carefully. It never fucking happened. It was a phony operation Johnson used to justify a wider Vietnam War. That’s an indisputable fact today. We didn’t know it at the time. So yeah, I think the Deep State is capable of anything.”

It is true that Johnson — who Stone believes had Kennedy assassinated — lied about U.S. ships coming under fire in the Gulf of Tonkin, justifying the resolution which remains the blueprint for military action undertaken by presidents without congressional approval. But that doesn’t necessarily say much about what is happening now in Syria.

But for Stone, it’s all part of the Deep State.

“There’s a permanent bureaucracy — I think what Eisenhower called the military industrial complex — of people in the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies and the defense contracting industry who have one neocon-based worldview,” he said. “They like foreign wars; they’re extremely profitable for some people.”

Stone was starting to sound like a hippie again.

But as he went on about the Deep State, which he thinks may have twice tried to assassinate him recently, I wondered if weed was making him paranoid — he has, after all, claimed to be developing a strain called Tricky Dick, whose primary feature, I imagine, would be paranoia.

“Am I paranoid? No, I’m pretty realistic,” he responded.

 

 

 

ATTACHMENT NINE – From the daily beast

ROGER STONE: I’M ‘DISAPPOINTED’ ALEX JONES ISN’T SELLING MY T-SHIRTS

 

By Julia Arciga.  Updated Apr. 11, 2019 4:34PM ET / Published Apr. 11, 2019 4:19PM ET 

 

Longtime Trump pal Roger Stone said he was “disappointed” in InfoWars’ Alex Jones for not selling his branded T-shirts and contributing to his legal defense fund after he was indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller for allegedly lying about his work with the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks. “Actually, I’m kind of disappointed in Alex. He is not selling the iconic ‘Roger Stone did nothing wrong T-Shirts,’” Stone told the Jim Norton & Sam Roberts show on SiriusXM. “It was the T-shirt I was arrested in, and he’s not selling them. I’ve expected a nice contribution to my legal defense fund, and have not received one. I’m a little disappointed.” When asked what he felt an appropriate donation would be, Stone said “25 large would make me happy” but recognized that Jones has his own legal issues to worry about. In a seven-count indictment, Stone was accused of obstruction, witness-tampering, and false statements earlier this year. Jones currently faces lawsuits stemming from his conspiracy theories about the Sandy Hook mass shooting.

 

 

ATTACHMENT TEN (A) – From SALON 

 

KIMBERLY GUILFOYLE BRAGGED ABOUT RAISING $3 MILLION FOR JAN. 6 RALLY: REPORT

 

Guilfoyle also pressured the event staff to give a platform to Alex Jones, Roger Stone, and Ali Alexander

 

By JON SKOLNIK

PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 18, 2021 2:42PM (EST)

 

Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr.'s girlfriend who also served as an advisor to the former president, reportedly boasted about raising millions of dollars to bankroll Donald Trump's "Stop the Steal" rally, which directly led to the violent riot on the Capitol. 

According to a Thursday report by ProPublica, Guilfoyle was at the center of a sweeping fundraising operation involving a number of big money Republican donors – namely Julie Jenkins Fancelli, a Publix supermarket heir. Fancelli's apparent connection to Guilfoyle was revealed in a text exchange, obtained by the outlet, between Guilfoyle and Katrina Pierson, the White House liaison to the rally. In a back-and-forth, Guilfoyle apparently emphasized her fundraising role while asking for Pierson's permission to introduce Trump Jr. to the podium. 

"Literally one of my donors Julie at 3 million," Guilfoyle said, an ostensible reference to the amount raised through Fancelli. 

According to Propublica, Caroline Wren, a former deputy to Guilfoyle, also worked hand-in-hand with her boss to supercharge the event. During the leadup to the event, Guilfoyle and Wren were reportedly coordinating a pressure campaign to allow certain far-right speakers to join the event's existing slate. Such names include Infowars conspiracist Alex Jones, far-right activist Ali Alexander, and Roger Stone, a former advisor to Trump. In an apparent bid to circumvent Pierson's go-ahead, Wren reportedly called the event staff and asked them to include the aforementioned men in the event's lineup, specifically demanding that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton – a major proponent of Trump's election conspiracy – be added. 

ProPublica obtained texts between Pierson and Guilfoyle speaking of a "leaked" lineup – later published by conservative news site Breitbart – that included Alexander, Stone and Paxton. 

"All I know is that someone leaked a list of 'speakers' that the WH had not seen or approved," Pierson wrote to Guilfoyle. "I've never had so much interference."

"Yea and this the list we approved," Guilfoyle, now a senior advisor for the Senate campaign of the disgraced former Republican governor of Missouri, Eric Greitens, responded. It remains unclear what she meant by "we." 

 

Guilfoyle and Fancelli's relationship dates back to early last year, ProPublica reports, when Guilfoyle was made the national chair of the Trump Victory finance committee – a fundraising entity designed to bolster Trump's re-election effort. In July of last year, Guilfoyle reportedly secured a $250,000 lump sum donation to Trump Victory, incrementally collecting hundreds of thousands of more from the Fancelli as Trump's campaign dragged on. 

Following the election, Wren was reportedly appointed as Trump's main fundraising czar after being charged with leading his "Save the US Senate PAC," which sought to crush the Democratic Senate bids in the recent Georgia runoff elections. According to ProPublica, the PAC was endowed $800,000 by LJ Management Services Inc., a company tied to Fancelli's family foundation.

Although her scheme to re-elect the president was ultimately unsuccessful, Guilfoyle has remained in Trump's good graces as a leading fundraiser. She is also currently spearheading Trump's "Make America Great Again, Again!" super PAC, launched in early October.

 

ATTACHMENT TEN (B) – FROM RAW STORY VIA SALON

 

TRUMP IS FURIOUS WITH DON JR'S "ANNOYING" GIRLFRIEND KIMBERLY GUILFOYLE

She raised eyebrows during the 2020 campaign for bragging that she would give lap dances to big money donors

By TOM BOGGIONI  PUBLISHED JULY 10, 2021 5:00AM (EDT)

 

According to a report from Politico's Playbook, Donald Trump is furious with Kimberly Guilfoyle -- the girlfriend of oldest son Don Jr. -- and has reportedly told close aides he finds her "annoying."

Guilfoyle -- the former Fox News personality who was fired over sexual harassment claims -- had raised eyebrows during the 2020 presidential campaign for bragging that she would give lap dances to big money donors. She recently latched on as a campaign aide to controversial Missouri Republican Eric Greitens who is seeking the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Sen. Roy Blunt (R).

Republicans, in general, are not pleased by Greiten's run since he was forced out as Missouri governor in 2018 over sexual abuse and blackmail allegations  involving his then-mistress, and Trump views the former Navy SEAL's run for office as a problem for the Republican Party seeking to reclaim the U.S. Senate.

According to Politico Playbook, Trump takes a dim view of both Greitens and Guilfoyle.

"It's Donald Trump's most frequent complaint: people profiting off his name. The latest offender? His son's girlfriend, MAGA's own Eva Perón, Kimberly Guilfoyle," the report states before adding that aides claim "Trump has been openly griping that Guilfoyle joined Eric Greitens' campaign for Senate in Missouri as national campaign chair, and he's becoming increasingly short with Guilfoyle."

According to one Trump insider, "Trump thinks Greitens is problematic, and that Kim is annoying, "adding, "He [Trump] said, 'Why the f*ck is she working for him?'"

The report goes on to add that Trump -- at the moment -- has no intention of endorsing the scandal-plagued Republican and he views Guilfoyle's employment by him as an opportunity for Greitens to trade on the Trump name without his approval.

 

 

ATTACHMENT ELEVEN – From al Jazeera  

 

FORMER TRUMP AIDE MEADOWS COOPERATING WITH CAPITOL RIOT PANEL

Donald Trump’s ex-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows had been called to appear before the House committee this month but did not do so.

Published On 30 Nov 2021

Former US President Donald Trump’s ex-chief of staff is cooperating with a congressional panel investigating the deadly January 6 Capitol insurrection, including providing documentation, the committee’s chairman has said.

The agreement announced on Tuesday comes after two months of negotiations between Mark Meadows and the US House of Representatives committee, which is probing the events that led up to the deadly riot by a mob of Trump supporters at the US Capitol building.

It also comes after the US Department of Justice indicted longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon for defying a subpoena to cooperate in the investigation.

Democratic Representative Bennie Thompson, chairman of the House of Representatives select committee investigating the deadly events, said in a statement on Tuesday that he expects Meadows “to provide all information requested”. 

“Mr. Meadows has been engaging with the Select Committee through his attorney. He has produced records to the committee and will soon appear for an initial deposition,” Thompson said.

On January 6, Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol in a bid to prevent Congress from formally certifying his 2020 presidential election loss to Democrat Joe Biden. Five people died and more than 100 law enforcement officers were injured.

Shortly before the riot, Trump gave a speech to his supporters repeating his false claims that the election was “stolen” from him through widespread voter fraud. He urged to crowd to “fight like hell” to “stop the steal” and was later impeached for “incitement of insurrection”.

Trump has sought to block the release of White House documents related to the January 6 insurrection by invoking “executive privilege”. The Biden administration rejected that argument in October, but Trump has gone to the courts to seek an order barring the release.

The former Republican president has urged his former associates not to cooperate with the committee, calling the Democratic-led investigation politically motivated and arguing that his communications are protected.

Several have refused to cooperate with the panel, which has scheduled a vote for Wednesday to pursue contempt charges against a separate witness, former Department of Justice official Jeffrey Clark, after he appeared for a deposition but declined to answer questions.

On Tuesday, a panel of US appeals court judges showed scepticism towards Trump’s bid to withhold records about his conversations and actions before and during the deadly riot.

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson questioned why Trump should be able to challenge and overrule Biden’s determination that the records should be handed over. “Is there a circumstance where the former president ever gets to make this sort of call?” asked Jackson.

Trump’s lawyer argued that a 1978 law called the Presidential Records Act gives Trump that power. “I don’t see that in the statute,” Jackson responded.

Meanwhile, the House panel says that it has questions for Meadows, the ex-Trump chief of staff, that do not directly involve conversations with the former president and could not be blocked by executive privilege claims.

In the committee’s subpoena, Thompson cited Meadows’ efforts to overturn Trump’s 2020 election defeat and his pressure on state officials to push the ex-president’s false claims of widespread voter fraud.

Meadows’s lawyer, George Terwilliger, said he was continuing to work with the committee and its staff on a “potential accommodation” that would not require Meadows to waive executive privilege nor “forfeit the long-standing position that senior White House aides cannot be compelled to testify before Congress”, as Trump has argued.

“We appreciate the Select Committee’s openness to receiving voluntary responses on non-privileged topics,” Terwilliger said in a statement.

Terwilliger had previously said that Meadows would not comply with the panel’s September subpoena because of Trump’s executive privilege claims.

 

ATTACHMENT TWELVE – From the New York Times 

 

MEADOWS AGREES TO COOPERATE IN CAPITOL ATTACK INVESTIGATION

Donald J. Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, has turned over documents and agreed to be deposed in the House’s inquiry into the Jan. 6 attack.

By Luke Broadwater  Nov. 30, 2021  Updated 4:36 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON — Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff under President Donald J. Trump, has reached an agreement with the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol to provide documents and sit for a deposition, the panel said on Tuesday, a stunning reversal for a crucial witness in the inquiry.

The change of stance for Mr. Meadows, who had previously refused to cooperate with the committee in line with a directive from Mr. Trump, came as the panel prepared to seek criminal contempt of Congress charges against a second witness who has stonewalled its subpoenas. It marked a turnabout after weeks of private wrangling between the former chief of staff and the select committee over whether he would participate in the investigation, and to what degree.

“Mr. Meadows has been engaging with the select committee through his attorney,” Representative Bennie G. Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and chairman of the panel, said in a statement. “He has produced records to the committee and will soon appear for an initial deposition.”

Mr. Thompson indicated that he was withholding judgment about whether Mr. Meadows was willing to cooperate sufficiently, adding, “The committee will continue to assess his degree of compliance with our subpoena after the deposition.”

His deposition is expected to be private, as has been the panel’s practice with other witnesses.

Mr. Meadows’s lawyer, George J. Terwilliger III, also suggested that there were strict limits to his client’s willingness to participate in the inquiry.

“As we have from the beginning, we continue to work with the select committee and its staff to see if we can reach an accommodation that does not require Mr. Meadows to waive executive privilege or to forfeit the longstanding position that senior White House aides cannot be compelled to testify before Congress,” Mr. Terwilliger said in a statement. “We appreciate the select committee’s openness to receiving voluntary responses on non-privileged topics.”

CNN earlier reported that Mr. Meadows had reached a deal with the panel. 

Citing a claim of executive privilege from Mr. Trump, Mr. Meadows’s lawyer, Mr. Terwilliger wrote to the committee on Nov. 10 saying that his client could not “in good conscience” provide testimony out of an “appreciation for our constitutional system and the separation of powers,” asserting that doing so would “undermine the office and all who hold it.”

That stance was condemned by the leaders of the committee, Mr. Thompson and Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and the vice chairwoman, who accused Mr. Meadows of defying a lawful subpoena. They said they would consider pursuing contempt charges to enforce it.

Mr. Thompson and Ms. Cheney called Mr. Trump’s privilege claims “spurious,” and added that many of the matters they wished to discuss with Mr. Meadows “are not even conceivably subject to any privilege claim, even if there were one.”

Among their questions, they said, were whether he was using a private cellphone to communicate on Jan. 6 and the location of his text messages from that day.

 

A key issue yet untested. Donald Trump’s power as former president to keep information from his White House secret has become a central issue in the House’s investigation of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Amid an attempt by Mr. Trump to keep personal records secret and the indictment of Stephen K. Bannon for contempt of Congress, here’s a breakdown of executive privilege:

What is executive privilege? It is a power claimed by presidents under the Constitution to prevent the other two branches of government from gaining access to certain internal executive branch information, especially confidential communications involving the president or among his top aides.

What is Trump’s claim? Former President Trump has filed a lawsuit seeking to block the disclosure of White House files related to his actions and communications surrounding the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. He argues that these matters must remain a secret as a matter of executive privilege.

Is Trump’s privilege claim valid? The constitutional line between a president’s secrecy powers and Congress’s investigative authority is hazy. Though a judge rejected Mr. Trump’s bid to keep his papers secret, it is likely that the case will ultimately be resolved by the Supreme Court.

Is executive privilege an absolute power? No. Even a legitimate claim of executive privilege may not always prevail in court. During the Watergate scandal in 1974, the Supreme Court upheld an order requiring President Richard M. Nixon to turn over his Oval Office tapes.

May ex-presidents invoke executive privilege? Yes, but courts may view their claims with less deference than those of current presidents. In 1977, the Supreme Court said Nixon could make a claim of executive privilege even though he was out of office, though the court ultimately ruled against him in the case.

Is Steve Bannon covered by executive privilege? This is unclear. Mr. Bannon’s case could raise the novel legal question of whether or how far a claim of executive privilege may extend to communications between a president and an informal adviser outside of the government.

What is contempt of Congress? It is a sanction imposed on people who defy congressional subpoenas. Congress can refer contempt citations to the Justice Department and ask for criminal charges. Mr. Bannon has been indicted on contempt charges for refusing to comply with a subpoena that seeks documents and testimony.

The select committee issued a subpoena for Mr. Meadows’s records and testimony in September, citing his involvement in the planning of efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 election. In Mr. Trump’s final weeks in office, Mr. Meadows repeatedly pushed the Justice Department to investigate unfounded conspiracy theories, according to emails provided to Congress, portions of which were reviewed by The New York Times. He was also in communication with organizers of the rally on Jan. 6 that preceded the violence, including Amy Kremer of Women for America First, the committee said.

The committee on Wednesday is expected to begin contempt of Congress proceedings against Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official involved in Mr. Trump’s effort to upend the election.

The vote would be the second such confrontation between the committee and an ally of Mr. Trump since Congress began investigating the circumstances surrounding the Capitol riot, which resulted in multiple deaths and dozens of injuries.

The House voted in October to recommend that another of Mr. Trump’s associates, Stephen K. Bannon, be charged with criminal contempt of Congress for stonewalling the inquiry.

A federal grand jury subsequently indicted him on two counts that could carry up to two years behind bars in total.

 

ATTACHMENT THIRTEEN – From the Daily Beast (via DJI.211105)

 

Now, with Meadows, we have come full circle … a conspirator with Trump in the false flag notion that the rioters “must be Democrats” (other wingnuts and Congressthings have even averred that the thousands of insurrectionists were secret agents from Antifa or, perhaps, the Freemasons, besmirching the good name of Trumpism with their Capitol antics.  Trump, as we have noted before, is probably right… at least culturally, if not entirely politically.  Our last nugget of evidence derives from this Bestial reprint! – DJI

 

STEVE BANNON’S SHOUT-OUT TO A LEFT-WING TERROR GROUP

In a rip-roaring speech at a rally in New York, Trump’s top adviser channeled one of the 20th century’s most controversial leftist groups.

By Robert Radosh

Last August I wrote an article for the The Daily Beast [that has now gone viral] about a strange encounter I had with Steve Bannon at a party on Nov. 12, 2013. Bannon, whom I had never met, came up to me and informed me that he was a “Leninist” who wanted to bring down the establishment including the Republican and Democratic Parties. Back then, he was organizing and speaking for the Tea Party, and his sights were set on winning Congressional races. They were the vehicle through which he hoped his ideas would take root and that by winning races the Tea Party activists would set the stage for a future populist transformation.

Bannon has certainly come far. Not only is he a senior adviser to the president at the White House, he is hiring many of his former staff at Breitbart.com to join him. He has been given an unprecedented seat on the Principles Committee of The National Security Council (never before given to a political adviser by any administration, Democrat or Republican). Not content with this, Bannon has created a counter group to the NSC in his office, called the Strategic Initiatives Group. The NSC’s “stature, independence and influence,” as Julie Smith and Derek Chollet write in Foreign Policy, has been even more eroded. As they put it, “Bannon and his team have been increasing their public profiles on foreign policy issues in recent days,” which may be an understatement.

It is no wonder that Bannon is sarcastically being referred to by many commentators as “President Bannon.” This past week, it was Bannon- not the president- who got the cover story in Time which called him “the Second Most Powerful Man in the World.” Because of his importance in the Trump administration, there is great interest in finding out what he believes, and what motivates him.

The answer is to be found in a speech Bannon delivered in New York City to an outdoor rally to the New York Tea Party on April 15, 2010. Here he is angry, and inflames the rowdy crowd with his attacks on the “world financial system.” Bannon attributes the financial collapse to “the financial elites and the American political class.” They took care of themselves, he tells the crowd, and let everyone else suffer, as government took over the financial industry, the auto industry and the health system. He refers to the “ticking time bomb” of mortgage defaults, and he calls the situation an “existential threat” to the nation, a “true crisis” that threatens the nation’s sovereignty. “Our beloved country is an addict,” he says, led by the “pushers on Wall Street.” Then he holds up a copy of The New York Times which he calls the paper “of the liberal elite,” while he describes The New York Post as the paper of the people. The Tea Party, Bannon says, are the people who fight our wars, pay our taxes, work in civic organizations—“the beating heart of the greatest nation on earth.”

It is the end of his speech, however, that is most important. After blasting Anderson Cooper and CNN, he concludes with words that somehow have escaped all the commentators who have been writing on Bannon:

"It doesn’t take a weatherman to see which way the wind blows, and the winds blow off the high plains of this country, through the prairie and lights a fire that will burn all the way to Washington in November."

Although his audience may not have gotten the reference, he was saying that he and the Tea Party are revolutionaries who want to bring down the system. Bannon took the phrase from a verse of Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues, which was used by the self-proclaimed revolutionary young people in the late ’60s and ’70s who created first the Weathermen, and then the Weather Underground terrorist group from the detritus of Students for a Democratic Society. Their publication in which they spread their ideas was named Prairie Fire, and four years before he spoke, the Weather Underground’s leaders—Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and Jeff Jones published their writings for a new generation, in the book Sing a Battle Song, a compendium of the group’s revolutionary arguments.

These revolutionary New Leftists’ goal was to use bombing and guerrilla warfare tactics to bring down our democratic capitalist system, to smash the state and create a revolution in the United States. Clearly Bannon is consciously revealing that he sees the Tea Party as the equivalent of a new revolutionary movement, that will play the same role as did the Weather Underground by organizing to destroy the old order.

Recent articles, including one in The Washington Post by Frances Stead Sellers and David A. Fahrenthold, and another one by Steve Reilly and Brad Heath in USA Today, have presented his views from his take on Islam, which he believes we are at war with, to his belief that there is a crisis of national sovereignty which is being threatened by global elites, which necessitates “strong nationalist movements” being developed both here and abroad.

Bannon famously believes that “we’re at war,” not only with jihadists and Islam around the world, but at home with the press—the real opposition party—and the entire American left-wing. But to understand just what Bannon’s actual world view is, one must look at other speeches he gave to different Tea Party groups. The most recent was this past August, in the heat of Trumps’ campaign which Bannon had joined, before it was becoming apparent that Trump would win the White House.

Anyone who thinks Bannon is not smart will think differently after hearing his performance. In much of his speech he sounds like Bernie Sanders. He talks about how working-class and middle-class women who formed the Tea Party know how prices for groceries have gone up, and about the debt their children have incurred for going to college. He talks about the new Generation Zero, as he calls today’s young generation, that knows no history and hence buy into the illusions of Occupy Wall Street.

Here, Bannon’s anger is directed at the cultural, financial, industrial and political elite in America. His concern is for the enraged middle-class, who sees “socialism for the poor and the very wealthy,” while middle-class people are “paying for their own children’s destruction.” He notes how the bankers and the people at Goldman-Sachs, where he once worked, made money on the backs of regular people, who lost their homes and saw their incomes decline. [One wonders what he thinks of Stephen Mnuchin, who made a killing from owning One West Bank, that foreclosed on delinquent homeowners, and then evicted them from their houses and profited from their losses.] “There is no depression,” he says, “in Georgetown” and “in East Hampton.” The people he speaks to, he tells them, “are the last line of defense” for saving America.

Bannon distains Republicans and conservatives who, he thinks, got everything wrong by attacking the Tea Party. He names people he says he has “great respect for,” including conservative pundits Charles Krauthammer and David Frum. He and the Tea Party, Bannon emphasizes are not “homophobic, nativist” and “racist,” but simply people trying to save the country. Referring to America as a center-right nation, Bannon attacks the large national debt and out of control federal spending which keeps expanding it. And of course, he has no patience for the Occupy Wall Street movement who know very little about real life and how it works.

Bannon, of course, put it most succinctly in his much-discussed speech at the Vatican in 2014. It is here that he talked about “the global war against Islamic fascism” that must be waged, about crony capitalism that in the Marxist sense treats people as commodities, and where he praises the “entrepreneurial spirit… that can flow back to working-class and middle-class people.” If you put aside his nationalist solution, this is quite like the arguments made by most leftists and socialists.

What is different is that Bannon clearly favors an alliance with the new right-wing authoritarian and populist parties in Europe, with Le Pen’s National Front in France, Neil Farage’s UKIP in Britain, and Geert Wilders’ Party of Freedom in the Netherlands, as well as other similar ones throughout the continent. He states, attacking crony capitalism, that… "all the upside goes to the hedge funds and the investment banks, and to the crony capitalist with stock increases and bonus increases. And their downside is limited," because the banks will be saved and bailed out by middle-class taxpayers.

Now that he is in the White House, Bannon seeks to use the Trump presidency and administration as the vehicle to fulfill the very revolutionary goals he has sought since 2008. Referring to the movement he is helping build as revolution- “and this is a revolution,” Bannon emphasized in the Vatican speech, his end goal is to create “a new center-right populist movement.” That seems at first glance to be a benign goal, since other conservatives and centrists also favor it. But Bannon’s version is different- when he says “center-right” he means a new nationalist, anti-immigrant movement quite different from that favored by many conservatives and centrists. That alone, he believes will produce the revolutionary outcome he seeks.

Whether or not he will succeed remains to be seen.