1st before anything else, thank you to kamala harris and her team for choosing tim walz. josh shapiro would have tanked the ticket. tim walz? some 1 we can all get behind.
A New York Times reporter posted — on X — that the company would close its San Francisco headquarters "over the next few weeks."
CEO Linda Yaccarino wrote in an email to X employees that workers would move to offices in San Jose. X will also open a new office in Palo Alto where it will share space with xAI, the Times reported.
Since acquiring X in late 2022, Musk has worked overtime to take a sledgehammer to what he’s perceived as the website’s faults. He’s laid off most of the staff, instituted wild swings in content moderation policy and otherwise broken what was once a vital part of the information ecosystem. The damage done is coming into sharp focus ahead of this fall’s presidential election, as a series of actions from the site broadly, and from Musk himself, raise suspicions of the reactionary CEO’s putting his thumb on the scale for Trump.
After the success of a “Black Women for Harris” call on Zoom, another group, “White Dudes for Harris,” quickly followed its lead with a Zoom fundraiser of its own — raking in $4 million to support Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign. But during that same call, the group’s X account, @dudes4harris, was suspended. Many quickly pointed fingers at Musk, accusing him of suspending the account because of its success and trying to keep more X users from donating.
It’s not insignificant that just days before, Musk retweeted a Harris parody ad, in which a deepfake version of Harris appeared to call herself “the ultimate diversity hire.” Despite being a deepfake — digitally altering video of Harris’ mouth to match a voiceover — there was no label to indicate the video was manipulated, potentially breaking X’s own policies.
Meanwhile, the “artificial intelligence” tool that Musk ordered built for the platform, Grok, has put out misleading info of late, falsely claiming that Harris has missed the ballot deadline in key swing states after President Joe Biden dropped out last month. And as CNBC reported, a federal political action committee that Musk created set up a website that claimed to help viewers register to vote. People with ZIP codes in battleground states, however, got no such help, instead only having their personal data collected.
Rioters, spurred on by false reports that the attacker had arrived in the country illegally, have set cars on fire, hurled bottles, and attacked a hotel in South Yorkshire used to house asylum seekers.
In an attempt to dispel the rumors and quell the escalating violence, a judge took the unusual decision to identify the person being detained in connection with the attacks as Axel Muganwa Rudakubana, a 17-year-old born in Cardiff, Wales.
But the false reports had already spread like wildfire across pockets of the internet — including Elon Musk's X.
At the center of the unrest was the name Ali Al-Shakati.
Several X, Facebook, and TikTok accounts claimed that Al-Shakati — who does not exist — was a Muslim asylum seeker who had carried out the attacks at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport, near Liverpool.
The Times of London reported that the fake news had originated from a verified X account using the handle @Artemisfornow, which had more than 40,000 followers. The user has since denied this, instead blaming a Facebook post from a gossip blog.
Wherever the false reports originated, they rose to prominence when an X account called Channel 3 Now shared the false news, and far-right voices, including Andrew Tate, jumped on the bandwagon.
"If you look at the origins of that story, X obviously plays a major role," Sander van der Linden, a professor at the University of Cambridge and misinformation expert, told Business Insider.
Some key instigators behind the riots, including far-right activist Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) and Tate were banned from Twitter but reinstated after Musk bought the company.
"A lot of these individuals had been deplatformed, so they wouldn't have had an opportunity to amplify," Van der Linden said. "Twitter also previously had massive fact-checking and moderation resources before Musk took over and got rid of all of that."
let's close with c.i.'s 'Iraq snapshot:'
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we turn now to a major investigation by The Washington Post into Donald Trump’s relationship with the Egyptian government, which reportedly tried to funnel $10 million in cash to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. The cash weighed about 200 pounds when it was withdrawn from a state-run bank in Cairo at the request of an organization linked to the Egyptian intelligence service, just five days before Trump took office as president in 2017. The Post reports Trump earlier gave the same amount to his own campaign, and investigators suspected Trump expected to be repaid by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. But questions about the transaction went unanswered by the Justice Department under Trump’s Attorney General Bill Barr, who closed the case, citing, quote, “a lack of sufficient evidence” — a decision one DOJ official called “jaw-dropping.”
For more, we’re joined in Washington, D.C., by one of the reporters who broke this story. Carol Leonnig is the national investigative reporter for The Washington Post who focuses on White House and government accountability. Her new piece is headlined “$10M cash withdrawal drove secret probe into whether Trump took money from Egypt.”
Carol, thanks so much for being with us. Why don’t you start off with how you began this story in The Washington Post?
CAROL LEONNIG: My colleague Aaron Davis and I began this work while we were doing research for a book about the Justice Department under Donald Trump and under President Biden. In that research, we discovered far more details than we expected about an incredibly secretive probe. This probe began in early 2017 with what investigators at the Department of Justice called “jaw-dropping intelligence.”
The CIA alerted the Department of Justice days after Donald Trump was elected that they had what they considered pretty reliable information from an informant indicating that the president of Egypt planned or wanted to or ordered $10 million injected into Donald Trump’s — then-candidate Donald Trump’s campaign to help him get reelected. That would be illegal, and hiding that money would be money laundering. And if Donald Trump had taken that money, it would potentially be bribery and compromise of a sitting president by a foreign government.
DOJ investigators saw this as extremely disturbing and worrisome and eventually alerted top officials at the department who decided that Robert Mueller should take on the investigation. He had just newly been appointed in May of 2017 and was looking into foreign interference by Russia in the 2016 election, and now they wanted him to also look at this secret matter. Nothing about this was ever known to the public at the time.
What happened next, in the next phase, was that Mueller’s team, almost as they are shutting down their office in 2019, finally win a lengthy appeals court battle, a secret one, that closed down the federal courthouse in D.C. to sort of conceal the nature of the debate inside the hearing room. They obtain a record that seems to corroborate the intelligence. It shows that there was a $10 million cash withdrawal, very mysterious, people walking out of a bank branch near the Cairo airport with a large portion of all the U.S. bills then in the entire Egyptian banking system in duffel bags. No one signs for it. It comes out of a spy-linked account. And the reason this was so important, Amy, was, obviously, $10 million in cash walking out of a bank is a big deal, but it came out of the account linked to Egypt’s spy agency, essentially Egypt’s CIA. And that is what the original intelligence suggested, that el-Sisi, the president of Egypt, wanted to use his spy agency to get the money to Trump.
So, these things were lining up, but Mueller is leaving the building. He is now closing shop in early 2019 and hands off this investigation to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C. The boss of this investigation ultimately is the new attorney general, Bill Barr. It’s run by the U.S. Attorney Jessie Liu, who tells her investigators, “This is pretty impressive stuff,” but she wants to brief Barr on the matter. An investigation of a sitting president has to be briefed to the attorney general. But she returns from meeting with him and reviewing the evidence at the CIA with a different posture. Investigators feel that she’s done a 180. She was supportive of them continuing this investigation, and now she is telling them she doesn’t want to approve their subpoena for Trump’s bank records. These records were key, in their view, to determine: Did the money from Cairo that was mysteriously withdrawn five days before Donald Trump was elected, did it somehow return in some form to any of Donald Trump’s personal or campaign accounts? And they were blocked from doing that.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Carol Leonnig, talk about the meeting that at-the-time presidential candidate Donald Trump had with Sisi on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly that took place in the fall, months before President Trump took office.
CAROL LEONNIG: Yes. This meeting was very interesting to investigators later. And here are the two reasons why. Donald Trump was trying to burnish his foreign policy credentials and bona fides. He didn’t have a lot of experience in government, as he has already acknowledged himself, and so he wanted to show that he could make deals with foreign governments and foreign leaders, he could establish important relationships.
He meets with el-Sisi on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, which is held each year, and it’s September 20th, 2016. At that time, Donald Trump’s campaign was cash-starved. He was running out of money, and his advisers were trying to convince him to cut a check from his own accounts to help fund the last little bit of media buys that the campaign needed to purchase in order to stay, you know, vibrant and alive in the race. And he did not want to put any more of his own money in the campaign, because he thought he was going to lose. But after he meets el-Sisi — and he does this privately, Amy; some of it’s public, but some of the meeting is just him, el-Sisi and an interpreter from Egypt. And investigators found that very curious, because then, on October 28th, a month later, Donald Trump does agree to write a check to his own campaign, after much, much pleading from his advisers. Investigators saw this as an important moment: why, if Donald Trump had been absolutely insisting he wouldn’t donate to his campaign anymore, he finally did.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Carol Leonnig, you write in the piece — this would be an answer to the question: Well, why would Sisi want to have sway over President Trump? You write, “Over the course of his presidency, Trump shifted U.S. policy in ways that benefited the Egyptian leader, a man he was called 'my favorite dictator.' In 2018, Trump’s State Department released $195 million in military aid … the [U.S.] had been withholding over human rights abuses — a move that had been opposed by his first secretary of state — followed by the release of $1.2 billion more in such assistance.” Carol Leonnig?
CAROL LEONNIG: You know, Donald Trump really flipped the switch on U.S. policy towards Egypt. You may and your listeners may know that el-Sisi was viewed by the United States as both an ally, but a worrisome ally. Egypt is very important to the United States’ position in the Middle East, but el-Sisi had risen to power through a violent coup, a military coup. And in the wake of his rise to power, it became known that he was suspected to have played a key role in the military killing of supporters of his opponent, who had been democratically elected. He was also viewed as very comfortable with a host of human rights abuses against opponents and critics in his country and trying to violently shut down that opposition, using military and spy power to do that. So the United States viewed him with a little bit of remove and had put a hold on this very valuable military aid and had asked him and pressed him numerous times to do better on human rights at home.
But when Donald Trump got into office, he didn’t have any of those restrictions. He insisted that one of his first officials that he was going to meet as president was el-Sisi, something his own advisers encouraged him not to do, because that was showing too much support to the Egyptian president. Rex Tillerson, his then-secretary of state, counseled Trump not to release this military aid, that it would be too generous, and el-Sisi had done nothing to improve his record on democracy and free and fair elections and human rights record. Nothing. And so, Trump fired Tillerson and ordered the release of this aid.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Carol, “In the years since the Egypt case was closed,” you write, “the Sisi regime’s ambitions to influence senior U.S. government officials have been laid bare by the bribery conviction of [New Jersey Democratic] Sen. Bob Menendez, the former [chair] of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.” Can you draw that line, a man who was about to be sentenced in October, just before the election?
CAROL LEONNIG: Well, the key thing to know here is there was a very full and expansive investigation, with no holds barred, to figure out: Was Senator Menendez a foreign agent of the Egyptian government? There were records searched, encrypted signals, communications gathered, and what they found was he was. He was receiving money from an Egyptian national who was doing the bidding of Egyptian spy and military leaders, and ultimately from the Sisi regime. He was giving information to the Egyptian officials at high levels, including information that was deemed secret by our U.S. government, about our U.S. personnel in the Egyptian Embassy.
And what is also, to me, really striking, Amy, is el-Sisi has relied on his Egyptian version of the CIA, called the General Intelligence Service, to push his agenda abroad in the United States and to tamp down criticism at home. And here, the General Intelligence Service was a critical feature of reaching out to and intervening and directing Senator Menendez. And it was the General Intelligence Service accounts from which the $10 million in the Donald Trump investigation had been withdrawn five days before Donald Trump was elected. The same agency, the same government account was, according to the intelligence, at work trying to find a way to get money to Donald Trump. But that investigation was not allowed to proceed.
AMY GOODMAN: Carol Leonnig, we just have 20 seconds. Could this bribery investigation into Donald Trump be reopened?
CAROL LEONNIG: The information could be gathered. There could be an investigation that looked more deeply and looked at the actual records the original investigators wanted to. But the chances for prosecuting anyone who played a role in this and committed a crime are extremely low. The statute of limitations is over, and it’s unlikely that that could change.
AMY GOODMAN: Carol Leonnig, national investigative reporter for The Washington Post. We’ll link to your exclusive report, written with Aaron Davis, “$10M cash withdrawal drove secret probe into whether Trump took money from Egypt.”
What idiot sees Shapiro as a candidate who will help the ticket?
We haven't even gotten to the worst of it.
There's now the issue of a column he wrote in college. Mike Allen (AXIOS) mis-reports on that column:
A 31-year-old clip surfaced from Shapiro's college newspaper, in which he wrote that Palestinians were "too battle-minded" and "peace between Arabs and Israelis is virtually impossible and will never come."
- The opinion piece, "Peace not possible," ran in the Campus Times at the University of Rochester on Sept. 23, 1993.
- Shapiro told reporters Friday that the column doesn't represent his views today: "I was 20."
Before he wrote the column, he had already decided on a career in politics and already been elected student body president at the University of Rochester so let's not pretend that he was some young, naive student. He was a craven opportunist even back then (yes, Senator John Fetterman is correct about that). Equally true, that 1993 opinion resurfaced in late 2023 as he once again began attacking Palestinians and those who publicly defended them as the government of Israel began the 300-plus-days assault on Gaza.
But more to the point, Shapiro is who JD Vance wants to debate, wants to run against.
And a lot of people writing columns in support of Josh and a lot reporting on him grasp that which is why they write garbage like Mike Allen did -- garbage that ignores the explosive part of the column which, believe it or not, is not Josh Shapiro's hatred for Palestinians and his xenophobia.
No, the explosive part is when Shapiro wrote, "Despite my skepticism as a Jew and as a past volunteer in the Israeli army, I strongly hope and pray that this 'peace plan' will be successful."
Despite my skepticism as a Jew and as a past volunteer in the Israeli army?
Shapiro's team has rushed to insist that the 20-year-old mistyped and he was never in the Israeli army -- not even, they insist, as a volunteer.
He said what he said.
And if you're not getting how that's a deal breaker, think back to JD Vance getting all pissy when called on his rude remarks about people without children. He served! He raged that he served his country in the military!!!!
Now, as Elaine's pointed out, he's not really a combat veteran despite serving in war zones because he wasn't really serving as a combat soldier:
It's not necessary that Kamala pick a running mate who served in the military. (Walz was in the National Guard and Kelly was in the Navy.) It is necessary that she pick someone who won't provide easy ammo for the Trump campaign.
JD Vance will make the argument
that while he was serving in the US military, Josh Shapiro was serving
in the Israeli military. And the weak comeback of: no, no, he didn't,
he mispoke won't mean a damn thing. Because Josh did go to Israel to
serve. Military or not, he went to Israel to serve. (And let's note
that we don't know what he did in Israel -- no one does. With his own
hands, he wrote that he served in the Israeli military. From the mouths
of his team, we hear that's not the case.)
He went to Israel. This wasn't Peace Corps work, grasp that. This wasn't helping a poverty stricken nation, grasp that.
He was an American citizen and he elected to volunteer to help a government -- a foreign government.
If you missed it, the US government is now wanting US flags to be made in the US. It's a new fever of patriotism and the man who could serve the government of Israel but not his own country looks suspect.
Is he wanting to be vice president to serve the United States or to serve Israel?
When he felt the need to volunteer, it wasn't for America. When he felt the need to get married, America wasn't good enough for him then either. He and his American bride got married in Israel.
Donald Trump is currently still questioning whether or not Kamala is Black. Previously, he questioned whether or not Barack Obama was born in this country.
It's not a stretch of the imagination to picture Donald at one of his rallies yelling something like, "For all I know, he's a citizen of Israel -- an Israeli-American."
Josh's own actions and remarks have made himself the other. He's far too tied to another nation to be seen by most Americans as someone who will put the United States first.
And we don't have time to waste, over the next two and a half months, putting aside the party's message, setting aside the issues, to turn into a 24-7 rapid response team for a lousy vice presidential pick. Anyone with a brain should be able to grasp that Shapiro is.
Speaking at a conference hosted by the far right Israel Hayom newspaper, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich complained about having to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza, saying that international norms are stopping Israel from taking what he claims is the “moral” path of starving 2 million Palestinians to death.
“We are bringing in aid because there is no choice,” Smotrich said, Israeli outlets reported. “We can’t, in the current global reality, manage a war. Nobody will let us cause 2 million civilians to die of hunger even though it might be justified and moral until our hostages are returned.”
“Humanitarian in exchange for humanitarian is morally justified, but what can we do? We live today in a certain reality, we need international legitimacy for this war,” he went on.
His mention of 2 million civilians appears to be in reference to Gaza’s pre-genocide population of of roughly 2.2 million people, including 600,000 children.
Smotrich’s statement represents yet another brazen and horrifying call for the annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza, with Israeli officials repeatedly issuing public calls for mass death and ethnic cleansing over the course of their genocide.
The comment is indicative of Israel’s intent to commit genocide. Although Israeli officials have insisted in public statements that they are simply hunting down Hamas soldiers, many reports have indicated that the Israeli military considers any Palestinian — adult or child — to be a potential Hamas soldier. This is also evident from the vast civilian death toll of Israel’s indiscriminate extermination campaign so far.
The UN special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression has condemned Israel’s killing last week of Al Jazeera journalist Ismail al-Ghoul and cameraman Rami al-Rifi in Gaza, urging that their deaths be prosecuted as a war crime.
“I strongly denounce the deliberate targeting by Israel of two journalists in Gaza, which adds to an already appalling toll of reporters and media workers killed in this war,” Irene Khan said in a statement.
The two men were killed in a July 31 air strike by the Israeli military, which said al-Ghoul was a Hamas operative who took part in the October 7 attack against Israel.
Al Jazeera has rejected what it said are “baseless allegations”, saying that journalism was his only profession.
“Given Israel’s failure to heed earlier calls for accountability, I urge the International Criminal Court to move swiftly to prosecute the killings of journalists in Gaza as a war crime and call on the international community to urgently consider the use of international mechanisms to investigate crimes against journalists in Gaza,” Khan added.
Gaza remains under assault. Day 305 of the assault in the wave that began in October. Binoy Kampmark (DISSIDENT VOICE) points out, "Bloodletting as form; murder as fashion. The ongoing campaign in Gaza by Israel’s Defence Forces continues without stalling and restriction. But the burgeoning number of corpses is starting to become a challenge for the propaganda outlets: How to justify it? Fortunately for Israel, the United States, its unqualified defender, is happy to provide cover for murder covered in the sheath of self-defence." CNN has explained, "The Gaza Strip is 'the most dangerous place' in the world to be a child, according to the executive director of the United Nations Children's Fund." ABC NEWS quotes UNICEF's December 9th statement, ""The Gaza Strip is the most dangerous place in the world to be a child. Scores of children are reportedly being killed and injured on a daily basis. Entire neighborhoods, where children used to play and go to school have been turned into stacks of rubble, with no life in them." NBC NEWS notes, "Strong majorities of all voters in the U.S. disapprove of President Joe Biden’s handling of foreign policy and the Israel-Hamas war, according to the latest national NBC News poll. The erosion is most pronounced among Democrats, a majority of whom believe Israel has gone too far in its military action in Gaza." The slaughter continues. It has displaced over 1 million people per the US Congressional Research Service. Jessica Corbett (COMMON DREAMS) points out, "Academics and legal experts around the world, including Holocaust scholars, have condemned the six-week Israeli assault of Gaza as genocide." The death toll of Palestinians in Gaza is grows higher and higher. United Nations Women noted, "More than 1.9 million people -- 85 per cent of the total population of Gaza -- have been displaced, including what UN Women estimates to be nearly 1 million women and girls. The entire population of Gaza -- roughly 2.2 million people -- are in crisis levels of acute food insecurity or worse." THE NATIONAL notes, "Gaza's Health Ministry on Tuesday said that at least 39,653 Palestinians were killed and 91,535 injured in the Israel-Gaza conflict since October 7. The latest toll includes 30 people killed and 66 injured in the past 24 hours, the ministry added." Months ago, AP noted, "About 4,000 people are reported missing." February 7th, Jeremy Scahill explained on DEMOCRACY NOW! that "there’s an estimated 7,000 or 8,000 Palestinians missing, many of them in graves that are the rubble of their former home." February 5th, the United Nations' Phillipe Lazzarini Tweeted:
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