Tag Archives: conspiracy

Donald Trump and Bill Clinton Collide in Best Conspiracy Story Ever

Mother Jones

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Oh man, this is the best Clinton conspiracy story ever. Except apparently it’s true:

Former president Bill Clinton had a private telephone conversation in late spring with Donald Trump at the same time that the billionaire investor and reality-television star was nearing a decision to run for the White House, according to associates of both men. Four Trump allies and one Clinton associate familiar with the exchange said that Clinton encouraged Trump’s efforts to play a larger role in the Republican Party and offered his own views of the political landscape.

….The tone of the call was informal, and Clinton never urged Trump to run, the four people said. Rather, they said, Clinton sounded curious about Trump’s moves toward a presidential bid and told Trump that he was striking a chord with frustrated conservatives and was a rising force on the right.

One person with knowledge of Clinton’s end of the call said the former president was upbeat and encouraging during the conversation, which occurred as Trump was speaking out about GOP politics and his prescriptions for the nation.

Conservative heads must be exploding right about now. Is the Trump candidacy just a devious Clinton scheme to screw up the Republican primaries? It’s just the kind of thing a Clinton would do, after all. Did Bill know that Trump would confirm every horrible stereotype of conservative intolerance that moderates have of the GOP, thus ensuring a Hillary win in November? Or was it really just a casual call and Trump is still the real deal? Or…or…maybe the whole thing is yet another Trump PR stunt? Or maybe Bill has a mole inside the Trump campaign? OMG, OMG, OMG.

Anyway, the most fascinating thing about this is not the fact of the phone call itself, but the fact that four Trump allies spilled the beans to the Post reporters. That’s not just one loose-lipped nitwit. It’s as if Trump wanted this to get out. But why? And why the timing right before the first debate? Does Trump want to make sure he gets asked about this?

And how does this affect Trump’s candidacy? Does it make him less attractive to tea partiers, since he was consorting with the devil a few months ago? Or is it a net positive, because it makes him more attractive to moderates, who figure maybe Trump is OK if Bill Clinton encouraged him to “play a larger role”?

I dunno. I just want to know what conservative Trump supporters are thinking about this. I don’t see anything yet at Red State or The Corner or Hot Air or Power Line or Breitbart. Maybe they just haven’t caught up. Or maybe they don’t trust the reporting of the hated mainstream media in the first place. Stay tuned.

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Donald Trump and Bill Clinton Collide in Best Conspiracy Story Ever

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Lunatic Conspiracy Theories Aren’t What They Used to Be

Mother Jones

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As you may recall, a couple of weeks ago there was a minor hoorah over a military training exercise called Jade Helm, scheduled to take place this summer in various states in the southwest. A few lunatics in Texas got wind of this, along with a map or two, and decided that Jade Helm was really just a pretense for President Obama to take over Texas.

Sadly for me, this all happened while I was near the bottom of my chemotherapy regimen and I barely had enough energy to make an occasional run to the bathroom, let alone write blog posts about stuff like this. Today, however, the fine folks at PPP have given me a second bite at the apple. They polled a bunch of Republicans about Jade Helm, and then broke down the answers by which candidate they currently support. Here are the results:

Apparently a full third of the Republican base believes that President Obama plans to order the military to take over Texas. Booyah! And supporters of Ted Cruz and Rick Perry—who are probably mostly from Texas—believe this idiocy by 60-70 percent.

So what do we take from this? I think there are two main interpretations:

Fox and Rush and the rest of the conservative media have driven conservatives into such a frenzy that a third of them really, truly do believe that President Obama plans a military takeover of Texas.
Poll questions like this no longer have any real meaning. This is basically little more than a survey of mood affiliation that tests how much you hate and distrust President Obama. That is to say, a yes answer has little or nothing to with Jade Helm. It just means you really hate and distrust Obama.

I’m inclined to the second interpretation myself. It’s all good fun, but no, I don’t think that a third of Republicans really believe this nonsense. It’s just their way of showing that they’re members in good standing of the political faction that believes Obama is capable of anything in his power-mad struggle to turn the United States into a socialist hellhole. The rest is just fluff.

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Lunatic Conspiracy Theories Aren’t What They Used to Be

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Obama: It’s "Disturbing" That a Climate Change Denier Runs the Senate’s Environment Committee

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in the Huffington Post and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

President Barack Obama told Vice News in an interview released on Monday that it was “disturbing” that the chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works denied the existence of climate change. (Watch the video above.)

Obama was referring to Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), who threw a snowball on the Senate floor earlier this month to help make his case that climate change isn’t real. Even though Inhofe cited record low temperatures across the country as evidence that climate change was overplayed, the country has actually been experiencing a warmer than average winter.

“That’s disturbing,” Obama said when Vice’s Shane Smith pointed out that the stunt would have been funny if it weren’t for Inhofe’s chairmanship.

Inhofe, who wrote the book The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, has also cited Scripture as part of his argument for why climate change isn’t real.

Obama said he couldn’t fault people who were concerned about gas prices and that climate change was a difficult political issue address because it had no immediate payoff. But he also attributed some of the challenge to the influence that the oil and gas industry holds with elected officials.

“In some cases, though, you have elected officials who are shills for the oil companies or the fossil fuel industry and there’s a lot of money involved,” he said. “Typically in Congress the committees of jurisdiction, like the energy committees, are populated by folks from places that pump a lot of oil and pump a lot of gas.”

As president, Obama said that he hoped to get the country to see climate change “as a serious, immediate threat, not some distant vague thing.”

Obama added that he recognized that even if he was able to secure international commitments on climate change and improve fuel and appliance efficiency standards, climate change would still be a big problem when he left office.

“If I’m able to do all those things now, when I’m done we’re still gonna have a heck of a problem, but we will have made enough progress that the next president and the next generation can start building on it and you start getting some momentum.”

The way that his daughters understood the science of climate change, Obama said, gave him hope that future generations would force politicians to take on the threat.

“I guarantee you that the Republican party will have to change its approach to climate change because voters will insist upon it,” he said.

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Obama: It’s "Disturbing" That a Climate Change Denier Runs the Senate’s Environment Committee

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Yet Another IRS Scandal That Isn’t

Mother Jones

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Jonah Goldberg is outraged that there continues to be no outrage over the endless IRS “scandal.” Most of his column is the usual collection of misleading innuendo, but there is one new item: the IRS’s claim that Lois Lerner’s computer crashed in 2011 and thousands of her emails were lost. That does sound pretty fishy:

So now the IRS claims that a computer crash has irrevocably erased pertinent emails (an excuse I will remember when I am audited). National Review’s John Fund reports that the IRS’ manual says backups must exist. If emails — which exist on servers, clouds and elsewhere — can be destroyed this way, someone should tell the NSA that there’s a cheaper way to encrypt data.

Far be it from me to doubt the word of John Fund, but perhaps Goldberg should instead have read the Washington Post yesterday. The explanation for the crash, perhaps surprisingly, turns out to sound pretty plausible. Basically, the IRS keeps six months worth of email backups on tape, so when congressional investigators started asking for email records in mid-2013, backups were available only through late 2012. Lerner’s computer crashed in mid-2011, so everything prior to that was lost because it existed only in local files on her PC. The IRS has since tried to recover Lerner’s emails from the PCs of people she sent emails to, but that was only partially successful.

Nothing here sets off alarm bells to me. The key question, I think, is whether the IRS has contemporaneous documents showing that Lerner’s computer crashed in 2011 and attempts to recover her hard drive failed. And they do. This is well before the scandal broke, so it would take a pretty Herculean brand of conspiracy theorizing to imagine that this was somehow related to the scandal. Either Lerner deliberately crashed her hard drive because she suspected her actions might prompt an investigation two years later, or else the IRS has faked a bunch of emails from 2011 between Lerner and the IT team trying to recover her hard drive.

There’s also, as Steve Benen points out, the fact that Congress is mostly concerned with Lerner’s behavior in the election year of 2012. If the IRS were involved in a cover-up, faking a hard drive crash that destroyed emails from 2010 and 2011 is a pretty incompetent way of doing it.

So, anyway, that’s where the outrage is. Most of us concluded long ago that regardless of whether IRS policies were correct, the evidence pretty strongly suggests that they were bipartisan, targeting political groups on both left and right. There’s just no scandal there. At most there’s bad judgment, and probably not even that. Likewise, Lerner’s hard drive crash might turn out to be a scandal, but so far it sure doesn’t look like one.

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Yet Another IRS Scandal That Isn’t

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Did the Las Vegas Shooting Suspects Obtain Their Guns on Facebook?

Mother Jones

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A month before a married couple allegedly gunned down two police officers and a bystander in Las Vegas, suspect Jerad Miller went on Facebook looking for a gun. Any gun would do, Miller wrote, as long as it worked on the “evil tyrant bastards.”

On May 8, Miller posted the following on Facebook:

Facebook users soon chimed in to help Miller with his request. One person replied, “ak47.” A second asked, “What happened to urs?” A third offered, “What are you looking for.”

Miller replied, “Doesn’t matter, bolt action, semi, anything that can reach out and touch evil tyrant bastards. Idc I don’t care if its a hundred dollar pink 22 rifle lol.”

A fourth person chimed in that the “Gun store has plenty of rifles.” Miller replied, “We broke bro, believe me if we had the money we would be at some of the best gun stores in the country buying what we need. Idc if its a ww2 m4 lol. something for when they call us terrorists, we can defend ourselves.”

A fifth person recognized that the conversation was entering potentially illegal territory, and recommended that Miller hide his identity. “You and I both know that you shouldn’t be using Facebook for this. Get yourself a tor router and be anonymous like the constitution always intended,” the person wrote. Miller replied, “lol im just fucking around.”

But according to authorities, Miller wasn’t “just fucking around”—five people, including Miller and his wife, Amanda, are now dead. While we don’t know if the Millers were successful in obtaining any guns through Facebook, the fact that the post is still up raises questions about how well Facebook’s effort to crack down on illegal gun sales is working. In March, the social network announced that it would start deleting posts that offer to buy or sell guns without background checks. At the time, it wasn’t clear how Facebook planned to enforce the new guidelines. (As of 2012, Miller and his wife were not allowed to own guns because of his criminal record, according to Miller’s post on the conspiracy-peddling website, Infowars.)

“We are sickened to learn that the Las Vegas shooter attempted to obtain a rifle through Facebook. The post has remained live on Facebook for a month, demonstrating the inadequacy of Facebook’s gun policy,” said Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, in a statement. “Facebook continues to make it too easy for dangerous people to find guns and should prohibit gun sales outright.”

In a statement sent to Buzzfeed, a Facebook spokesperson said: “While this online discussion is certainly disturbing in light of recent events, we have not been made aware of any connection to an actual gun transaction offline.”

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Did the Las Vegas Shooting Suspects Obtain Their Guns on Facebook?

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Meet 5 of the Low-Level Drug Offenders Obama Could Set Free. There Are Thousands More Like Them

Mother Jones

On Wednesday, the Department of Justice announced that thousands of federal inmates serving time for certain non-violent crimes will soon be able to apply for clemency.

Those eligible to be set free will be prisoners convicted of low-level nonviolent crimes—mostly drug offenses—who have already served 10 years of their sentence, don’t have a significant criminal history, and are serving out a sentence the would likely be shorter had they been convicted for the same crime today. The rule change could apply to some 2,000 of the 200,000 inmates in federal prison, and is part of a wider effort by the Obama administration to make sentencing laws more fair. Last year, the DOJ changed sentencing guidelines to give judges the freedom to determine whether or not to apply mandatory minimums for certain drug charges.

Here are five federal prisoners who will be eligible for clemency under the DOJ’s new rules (via Families Against Mandatory Minimums):

Weldon Angelos: Angelos is serving 55 years for selling a few pounds of marijuana while in possession of a gun. In his early 20s, Angelos founded a successful Utah-based rap label called Extravagant Records, where he wrote and produced songs with artists like Snoop Dogg. In 2002, the Salt Lake City police, who suspected Angelos was part of a local gang, arranged for an informant to purchase marijuana from him. The informant claimed that Angelos had firearms with him during both buys. When the judge in the case was forced to sentence Angelos to a mandatory 55 years, he called the punishment “unjust, cruel, and even irrational,” noting that repeat child rapists and airplane hijackers get shorter sentences.

Sherman Chester: Chester is serving life without parole for selling cocaine and heroin as part of a drug ring. Chester started selling small amounts in his 20s and soon got involved in a drug conspiracy headed up by a family friend near Tampa, Florida. After an undercover detective bought from him on several occasions, Chester was indicted in federal court in 1992 along with nine others involved in the ring. He was 25. Chester was sentenced as if he had been in possession of nearly the entire amount of heroin and cocaine found on all members of the conspiracy. The judge who meted out Chester’s harsh punishment said, “This man doesn’t deserve a life sentence, and there is no way that I can legally keep from giving it to him.”

Sharanda Jones: Jones is serving life without parole for allegedly leading a drug ring. After high school, Jones worked as a restaurant manager and cosmetologist. Unable to support her family on her income, she began selling coke and crack in the Dallas area. In 1999, at age 32, Jones was found guilty of taking part in a conspiracy to sell crack, and sentenced to life. Jones received such a harsh sentence because she allegedly carried a gun when she went to buy cocaine from her supplier; because the court considered her a “leader” of the ring; and because she claimed innocence. Her co-conspirators got sentences that ranged between five and 19 years. Jones’ daughter, who was eight when Sharanda went to prison, is now an adult.

Barbara Scrivner: Scrivner is serving 30 years in federal prison for participating in a drug ring. Scrivner was molested as a child, and later fell into drugs and a string of abusive relationships. At age 26, in order to make ends meet, Scrivner started selling small amounts of meth as part of a drug ring. The other participants in the conspiracy were arrested in 1992, but Scrivner initially was spared because she only played a bit part in the ring. A year later, after she refused to testify against the other members, Scrivner was indicted and held accountable for 109 kilos of meth. Once behind bars, Scrivner plunged into depression and attempted suicide by jumping from a 40-foot prison building. She survived, and has since undergone rehab.

Timothy Tyler: Tyler is serving a mandatory life sentence for selling LSD. After high school, Tyler traveled around the country following the Grateful Dead, doing drugs, and being hospitalized for mental health problems. He was arrested a couple of times for selling. In 1992, Tyler sold LSD and marijuana to an informant, and was later charged with possession and conspiracy to distribute along with three other codefendants, one of whom was his father. Partly because of prior convictions, Tyler went to prison for life, while his codefendants only got five to ten years. His father died serving out his term.

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Meet 5 of the Low-Level Drug Offenders Obama Could Set Free. There Are Thousands More Like Them

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New Jersey officials arrested for conspiring to hide water pollution

New Jersey officials arrested for conspiring to hide water pollution

In the great Goofus and Gallant cartoon of life, this is the Goofus version of protecting clean water. Oh, also if this Goofus and Gallant cartoon were actually an episode of The Sopranos.

From Environment News Service:

Two top officials of the East Orange Water Commission have been charged with conspiring to close contaminated wells before monthly water tests so as to falsely report low levels of a regulated contaminant in drinking water supplied to customers, then opening the wells, allowing the chemical back into the water supply. …

[Executive director Harry] Mansmann and [assistant executive director William] Mowell allegedly conspired to falsify mandatory testing of the EOWC’s water supply to hide elevated levels of the contaminant tetrachlorethene, or PERC, an industrial solvent used for dry cleaning, which is classified as a probable carcinogen.

joeshlabotnik

Now with more PERC.

In addition to charges of conspiracy, the two were cited for official misconduct, unlawful release of a pollutant, and violations of state water quality laws. The two were responsible for the water quality of East and South Orange, home to some 80,000 people. According to ENS, one well had levels of PERC 25 times higher than the legal limit.

Our biggest fear is that this incident will lead to New Jersey getting a reputation for corruption, law-breaking, and pollution. God forbid.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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New Jersey officials arrested for conspiring to hide water pollution

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Another Massey executive will go to jail for his role in the Upper Big Branch explosion

Another Massey executive will go to jail for his role in the Upper Big Branch explosion

A former superintendent at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch Mine pled guilty today to his role in the 2010 explosion that killed 29 miners. From NPR:

[F]ormer Upper Big Branch coal mine superintendant Gary May was sentenced to 21 months in prison and ordered to pay a $20,000 fine. …

May pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy and admitted to ordering a company electrician to disable a methane monitor on a mining machine so it could continue to cut coal without automatic shutdowns. The monitor is a safety device that senses explosive amounts of methane gas and automatically shuts down mining machines when dangerous levels of gas are present. …

May also pleaded guilty to deceiving federal mine safety inspectors and hiding safety violations.

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A sign near the Upper Big Branch mine in 2010

Last November, another Massey executive, David Craig Hughart, pled guilty to conspiracy. At the time, we speculated that his co-conspirators might include former Massey CEO Don Blankenship; now we know that the conspiracy at least included May.

What May did — basically the equivalent of shutting off a home carbon monoxide detector that kept sounding its alarm — is reprehensible. There is some belated recognition that it should also have been preventable. Shortly after the announcement of May’s plea deal, the Mine Safety and Health Administration announced a new rule that could prevent similar situations in the future.

MSHA calls it the “pattern of violations” rule and it’s supposed to identify coal mines with serious, persistent and habitual safety violations and then target them for heightened scrutiny. But MSHA failed to enforce the rule in the first 33 years of its existence, in part because of a self-imposed and cumbersome regulatory step. …

Investigators concluded that the Upper Big Branch mine qualified for preliminary “pattern of violations” (POV) status before the April, 2010, explosion. But regulators failed to apply the rule, blaming a “computer glitch” that has never fully been explained.

The revised rule eliminates preliminary steps so that regulators will have a much easier time citing and sanctioning habitual violators of serious safety standards. The new rule also triggers automatic and immediate shutdowns of mining areas if serious and substantial violations are found in mines with POV status.

Unsurprisingly, those mining industry executives who have not pled guilty to conspiracy charges spoke out against the tightened rule. From The Hill:

The National Mining Association (NMA) panned the rule, saying MSHA ignored the group’s concerns about the rule. Among them is the loss of mine operators’ due process when responding to a violation notice.

“Because any unsafe conditions must be remedied under current regulations, no miner is put in harm’s way if a citation is appealed,” the NMA said in a written statement. “As such, the loss of due process rights serves no safety objective.”

The group said some operators would unjustifiably be found in a pattern of violation, with little recourse.

It could be worse.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Another Massey executive will go to jail for his role in the Upper Big Branch explosion

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Massey coal exec pleads guilty to conspiracy related to fatal 2010 mine explosion

Massey coal exec pleads guilty to conspiracy related to fatal 2010 mine explosion

Of the 31 miners who worked in the Upper Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia, 29 were killed in an explosion on April 5, 2010. In May of 2011, the company that owned the mine, Massey Energy, was found to be negligent and reckless in the disaster; that June, the government suggested that Massey had falsified its safety records.

Massey Energy’s former CEO, Don Blankenship, is “a really bad dude,” as David Roberts wrote in 2006. The 2010 explosion followed a long string of problems and warning signs. Blankenship doesn’t seem to have been concerned. As far back as 2003, he told Forbes that his company “[doesn’t] pay much attention to the violation count.”

Don Blankenship blocks the camera.

Perhaps the threat of jail time for one of Massey’s top executives will prompt other coal execs to pay closer attention. From the Associated Press:

An executive who ran several Massey Energy coal companies and worked closely with former CEO Don Blankenship faces criminal conspiracy charges and is cooperating with federal prosecutors, a sign that authorities may be targeting Blankenship himself in the fatal West Virginia blast that was the nation’s worst mine disaster in four decades.

David Craig Hughart, president of a Massey subsidiary that controlled White Buck Coal Co., is named in a federal information document — which signals a defendant is cooperating — filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Beckley. …

The court document accuses Hughart of working with “known and unknown” co-conspirators to ensure that miners underground at White Buck and other, unidentified Massey-owned operations received advance warning about surprise federal inspections “on many occasions and various dates” between 2000 and March 2010.

It’s easy to consider this abstractly, as an example of a bad boss in a dirty, aging industry. But the specifics of the charge are extremely sobering.

The explosion at Upper Big Branch was sparked by worn teeth on a cutting machine, and fueled by methane and coal dust. It was allowed to propagate by clogged and broken water sprayers. The force of the blast traveled miles of underground corridors, rounding corners and doubling back on itself to kill men instantly. …

A memo suggesting Blankenship regularly ordered underlings to put profits before safety emerged during a wrongful-death lawsuit filed by the widows of two men killed in a 2006 fire at Massey’s Aracoma Coal Alma No. 1 mine.

The memo told workers that if their bosses asked them to build roof supports or perform similar safety-related tasks, “ignore them and run coal.”

Hughart will plead guilty to a felony count of conspiracy to defraud the government and a misdemeanor conspiracy to violate health and safety standards. Other parties to the conspiracy might consider packing a go-bag and placing it near the front door.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Massey coal exec pleads guilty to conspiracy related to fatal 2010 mine explosion

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