Tag: jason miller
Debate Jitters: Trump Aides Fear Ex-President Is 'Walking Into A Trap'

Debate Jitters: Trump Aides Fear Ex-President Is 'Walking Into A Trap'

Some of President Joe Biden's supporters have been arguing that he never should have agreed to debate presumptive 2024 GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, but other Biden supporters don't see it that way at all — stressing that Trump would have attacked Biden as weak had he not agreed to a debate. Moreover, they add, Biden has repeatedly demonstrated over the years that he can be a tough, forceful debater.

Meanwhile, far-right War Room host Steve Bannon, according to Vanity Fair's Gabriel Sherman, is saying that Trump, not Biden, is the one who has the most to lose during the Thursday night, June 27 debate — which is being moderated by CNN hosts Jake Tapper and Dana Bash in Atlanta.

"According to two sources," Sherman reports, "Steve Bannon has told people Trump should never have agreed to debate. One of the sources told me Bannon explained that if Biden bombs the debate, Democrats will find a way to replace Biden on the ticket — a scenario (Trump senior adviser Jason) Miller shot down — and if Biden performs well, the race becomes even closer. Bannon declined to comment."

Miller, however, did comment on the June 27 debate, claiming that the format will be unfair to Trump.

Miller told Vanity Fair, "It's a three-on-one dynamic with Biden, Tapper and Bash. The structure makes it impossible for President Trump to get a fair shake."

After spending months falsely claiming that Biden is senile, Trump's supporters have come up with a new line of attack to explain his aggressive speeches on the campaign trail and during the 2024 State of the Union address: claiming that the 81-year-old president is using some type of drug to make himself appear more energetic — a claim there is zero evidence to support.

"A strong showing by Biden will neutralize Trump's claims about his opponent's cognitive decline," Sherman explains. "The Trump campaign knows this."

Sherman continues, "That's why, in recent days, Trump and his aides have been working overtime to mitigate the damage should Biden deliver a commanding performance similar to his fiery State of the Union address…. Trump wants to keep up the attacks on Biden's age while also explaining away a potentially strong performance from Biden. Some in Trumpworld are worried Trump is walking into a trap."

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

Jason Miller

CNN Names Trump's Co-Conspirators In 2020 Coup Attempt

Not long after Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith indicted former President Donald Trump on four counts for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election, CNN's Katelyn Polantz confirmed the identities of five of the unnamed co-conspirators that were included in Smith's criminal complaint.

Those people are Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Jeffrey Clark, and Kenneth Chesebro — all of whom were attorneys advising Defendant Trump at the time.

Then, on Tuesday's edition of Out Front with Erin Burnett, Polantz reported that "we are now learning that the senior campaign adviser who is signified in this indictment as one of the people who was giving Trump the harshest assessment that there was no fraud after the election that would overturn the vote, that person is Jason Miller."

Polantz continued, "I have been able to confirm that I've reached out to a representative of his and received no comment back, but I have been able to confirm that that is indeed Jason Miller. And this episode is just one of the highlights of how the special council's office was using information that the close advisors to Donald Trump on the campaign, people who even stuck with him after the 2020 election, may Miller continued to work with Donald Trump, continues to work with him. These are people who were telling him that there wasn't fraud and that Donald Trump and the alleged co-conspirators or the co-conspirators in this indictment who are not charged at this time that those people were doing something anomalous with what the campaign knew that there wasn't fraud and this."

According to the federal filing, Miller warned Trump that "when our research and campaign legal team can't back up any of the claims made by our Elite Strike Force Legal Team, you can see why we are 0-32 on our cases. I'll obviously hustle to help on all fronts, but it's tough to own any of this when it's all just conspiracy sh*t beamed down from the mothership."

Watch below or at this link.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

The Big Lie, Wrapped In More Lies -- And Finally Stripped Bare

The Big Lie, Wrapped In More Lies -- And Finally Stripped Bare

Now Americans know for certain what many suspected since Election Day 2020, which is that Donald Trump, his enablers in the Congress, his publicists on Fox News and his co-conspirators in the White House were in on the Big Lie from the very beginning. All of them understood all along that Trump's insistent claim about election fraud was false and intended solely to deceive their followers.

Both the original deception and its protective wrapping were ripped away by the House Select Committee's revelatory hearing on June 9.

It is now undeniable that Trump and his gang were aware from the first week of November 2020 that he had lost the election to Joe Biden. Trump aide Jason Miller testified to the select committee that the campaign's own data expert had informed the then-president he "was going to lose," based on an internal assessment of the reported "county-by-county, state by state results."

According to Miller, Trump rejected this incontrovertible judgment because he wanted to fight the outcome in court. But his campaign swiftly lost every case brought to contest the election on both the state and federal levels, in courts overseen by judges of both parties, culminating in the summary dismissal of its claims by the Supreme Court, with a conservative majority that included three of his appointees.

Trump and his cronies knew from the start that their legal claims were entirely meritless. So did the lawyers representing him, including Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, both of whom have suffered court disciplinary action for their conscious lies.

Everybody around Trump, and their brothers and sisters and cousins, knew that he and they were lying about the election, even as they stoked outrage among his gullible true believers. But they continued to promote the Big Lie — and all the subsidiary lies — as the fateful date of January 6 approached.

Attorney General William Barr testified that he told Trump on three separate occasions that the claims of fraud were absolutely baseless. "I made it clear I did not agree with the idea of saying the election was stolen and putting out this stuff, which I told the president was bullshit."

Yet instead of accepting the blunt assessment of the nation's highest law enforcement official, who had defended him during the Russia investigation, even misleading the public about the Mueller report, Trump threw Barr out of the Oval Office. He then attempted to appoint an eager flunky, Jeffrey Clark, as acting attorney general in order to foist a conscious lie on the states by misusing the authority of the Justice Department.

On December 28, 2020, Clark had drafted a letter to Georgia officials falsely asserting that the department had found voting irregularities that affected election results in several states. This was itself a conscious lie. What stopped Clark's appointment was a threat by Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and other top attorneys in the Justice Department and the White House to resign en masse, a potentially ruinous scandal.

The pattern was clear as the hearing proceeded, with Ivanka Trump testifying that she believed Barr (confirming a New York Times report that neither she nor her husband Jared Kushner credited Trump's "fraud" nonsense). But nobody around Trump saw any evidence to support the Big Lie, including the president himself.

Neither did the professional liars at Fox News, who gulled their audience into believing claims that they knew were ridiculous. At the hearing, Rep. Liz Cheney displayed an ominous text from Fox host Sean Hannity to White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany: "Key now, no more crazy people, no more stolen election talk. Yes, impeachment and 25th amendment are real. Many people will quit." In other words, Hannity knew that the Big Lie was a lie, even as he and his network mendaciously promoted it.

Conscious of its own guilt and involvement, Fox refused to televise the hearings, devoting its airtime to conspiracy theories. The same consciousness of guilt also seems to have seized a number of Republican members of Congress, whose futile efforts to obtain pardons from Trump during his final days in office were also disclosed by Cheney.

The only people who honestly swallowed the Big Lie were Trump's followers, thousands of whom assaulted the Capitol on that "wild" day of January 6. Now many of those unfortunate fools — the same crowd who invested their faith in fascist nonsense about coronavirus vaccines and Hollywood pedophiles — will go to prison because they believed in their golden calf, Donald Trump, who knew he was lying to them and leading them to the slaughter.

To find out more about Joe Conason and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Steve Bannon’s 'War Room' Podcast Is Platform For QAnon Propaganda

Steve Bannon’s 'War Room' Podcast Is Platform For QAnon Propaganda

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon's podcast, War Room: Pandemic, is a deceptive showcase for the QAnon conspiracy theory.

With its conspiratorial nature, calls for revolution and violence, and overwhelming number of QAnon-connected guests and co-hosts, the podcast mirrors other QAnon programming.

Bannon's podcast is broadcast by Real America's Voice, a far-right news site that also has a history of propagating QAnon content. Streaming platforms that host the show – including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and ViacomCBS' PlutoTV – are dispensing a program closely connected to the dangerous QAnon conspiracy theory.

Apple Podcasts has delisted dangerous conspiracy theory content in the past, including Alex Jones' Infowars. According to ProPublica, Apple Podcasts has declined to comment on why the company continues to list Bannon's show while it seemingly violates its terms of service against "harmful or objectionable content."

The former Trump adviser started toying around with the conspiracy theory publicly on his show in October 2020, describing QAnon as "the elephant in the room" and claiming it "at least appears directionally to be correct."


STEVE BANNON (HOST): This is the elephant in the room. The elephant in the room is this QAnon thing that's been out there.

The elephant in the room is, people say they're crazy, I'm just leaving that -- put a pin in it. But when they look at the facts of this, how are they not, at least an aspect of their argument, at least appears directionally to be correct.

After QAnon adherents and other Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6, Bannon attempted to distance himself from the conspiracy theory by labeling it an "FBI psyop."

Despite this attempt to distance himself, Bannon has grown increasingly supportive of the conspiracy theory, defending it from scrutiny. On the July 8 edition of his show, for example, Bannon complained that mainstream media "disparages" the conspiracy theory and uses its coverage to "smear" QAnon believers.

While "Q," the lead figure in the conspiracy theory, is not discussed on Bannon's program, the show's complete detachment from reality, its extremism, and the sheer number of QAnon connections make War Room appear essentially indistinguishable from other QAnon podcasts.

Bannon has embraced and touted his podcast guests as trustworthy sources of information on politics, without noting their connections to baseless conspiracy theories.

Here are some of the people connected to the QAnon conspiracy theory who have appeared on War Room:

Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, ViacomCBS' PlutoTV, and other outlets are responsible for providing a platform to Bannon and dozens of QAnon supporters and conspiracy theorists to spread their dangerous misinformation and lies about the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccines, elections, and more.

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