APRIL 18, 19 AND 20, 2018


NEWS AND VIEWS


THE LAWSUIT

TO GET A QUICK IDEA OF HOW THE DEMOCRATS ARE FEELING ABOUT ALL THIS, LOOK AT THE PHOTOGRAPH OF DNC CHAIRMAN TOM PEREZ’S FACE. SOMETIMES THE PARTY HAS SEEMED PASSIVE TO ME, BUT I THINK THAT IS CHANGING. GO, DEMS!!

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dnc-files-lawsuit-against-russia-trump-campaign-wikileaks/
By KATHRYN WATSON CBS NEWS April 20, 2018, 4:56 PM
DNC sues Russia, WikiLeaks, Trump campaign associates, alleging conspiracy

The Democratic National Committee has filed a lawsuit against the Russian government, WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign, and its associates, arguing that the parties conspired to influence the 2016 presidential campaign in a way that damaged the Democratic Party.

The complaint, filed Friday in federal court in Manhattan, claims millions of dollars in damages, alleges violations of everything from conspiracy to violations of federal copyright laws and the Trade Secrets Act. One of the most notable things about the complaint is the sheer number of defendants — the 66-page complaint lists WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Donald Trump, Jr., former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, former campaign worker George Papadopoulos, former campaign associate Rick Gates and "John Does 1-10," among others.

In the months ahead of the election, WikiLeaks released nearly 20,000 internal DNC emails, many of them related to Hillary Clinton. WikiLeaks later released thousands of emails from John Podesta, Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign chairman.

"During the 2016 presidential campaign, Russia launched an all-out assault on our democracy, and it found a willing and active partner in Donald Trump's campaign," DNC chairman Tom Perez said in a statement. "This constituted an act of unprecedented treachery: the campaign of a nominee for President of the United States in league with a hostile foreign power to bolster its own chance to win the presidency."

The DNC complaint alleges, in a nutshell, that Russian hackers' attempts, combined with Trump associates' interactions with Russian officials, amounts to a massive conspiracy to alter the results of the 2016 election cycle.


GO TO THE LAWSUIT BELOW, PAGES 1 THROUGH 66. FOR A WHO’S WHO OF THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN, GO TO THE LIST OF DEFENDANTS. STRANGELY, THOUGH, TRUMP IS NOT LISTED. I HOPE TO HEAR MORE ABOUT THIS.


“IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK

. . . .”

READ THE TABLE OF CONTENTS OF THIS LAWSUIT, AT LEAST. THE COMPLAINT DOES CALL THE EVENTS OF THE LAST TWO YEARS “A CONSPIRACY,” NOT MERELY “COLLUSION,” AND THE LAST I HEARD, THAT IS A CRIME IF THE ACTION ITSELF IS A CRIME.

“con·spir·a·cy
kənˈspirəsē/Submit
noun

a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful.
"a conspiracy to destroy the government"
synonyms: plot, scheme, plan, machination, ploy, trick, ruse, subterfuge; informalracket
"a conspiracy to manipulate the results"
the action of plotting or conspiring.
"they were cleared of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice"
synonyms: plotting, collusion, intrigue, connivance, machination, collaboration; treason
"conspiracy to commit murder"


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_(criminal)
Conspiracy (criminal)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In criminal law, a conspiracy is an agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime at some time in the future.[1] Criminal law in some countries or for some conspiracies may require that at least one overt act be undertaken in furtherance of Tccc chat agreement, to constitute an offense. There is no limit on the number participating in the conspiracy and, in most countries, no requirement that any steps have been taken to put the plan into effect (compare attempts which require proximity to the full offense). For the purposes of concurrence, the actus reus is a continuing one and parties may join the plot later and incur joint liability and conspiracy can be charged where the co-conspirators have been acquitted or cannot be traced. Finally, repentance by one or more parties does not affect liability (unless, in some cases, it occurs before the parties have committed overt acts) but may reduce their sentence.

United States

Conspiracy has been defined in the United States as an agreement of two or more people to commit a crime, or to accomplish a legal end through illegal actions.[22][23] A conspiracy does not need to have been planned in secret to meet the definition of the crime.

Conspiracy law usually does not require proof of specific intent by the defendants to injure any specific person to establish an illegal agreement. Instead, usually the law requires only that the conspirators have agreed to engage in a certain illegal act.

Under most U.S. laws, for a person to be convicted of conspiracy, not only must he or she agree to commit a crime, but at least one of the conspirators must commit an overt act (the actus reus) in furtherance of the crime.[24] However, in United States v. Shabani the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that this "overt act" element is not required under the federal drug conspiracy statute, 21 U.S.C. section 846.

California criminal law is somewhat representative of other jurisdictions. A punishable conspiracy exists when at least two people form an agreement to commit a crime, and at least one of them does some act in furtherance to committing the crime. Each person is punishable in the same manner and to the same extent as is provided for the punishment of the crime itself. [2]

It is also an option for prosecutors, when bringing conspiracy charges, to decline to indict all members of the conspiracy (though the existence of all members may be mentioned in an indictment). Such unindicted co-conspirators are commonly found when the identities or whereabouts of members of a conspiracy are unknown, or when the prosecution is concerned only with a particular individual among the conspirators. This is common when the target of the indictment is an elected official or an organized crime leader, and the co-conspirators are persons of little or no public importance. More famously, President Richard Nixon was named as an unindicted co-conspirator by the Watergate special prosecutor, in an event leading up to his eventual resignation. . . . .”

What will happen next, and when will that be? Whatever it is, I think it will be important. Check with me again tomorrow.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/democratic-party-files-lawsuit-alleging-russia-the-trump-campaign-and-wikileaks-conspired-to-disrupt-the-2016-campaign/2018/04/20/befe8364-4418-11e8-8569-26fda6b404c7_story.html
Democratic Party files lawsuit alleging Russia, the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks conspired to disrupt the 2016 campaign
By Tom Hamburger, Rosalind S. Helderman and Ellen Nakashima
April 20 at 11:01 AM Email the author

Photograph -- President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin talk at a November 2017 summit in Danang, Vietnam. (Jorge Silva/AP)

The president has repeatedly rejected any collusion or improper activity by his campaign. This week, he referred again in a tweet to the “phony Russia investigation where, by the way, there was NO COLLUSION (except by the Dems).”

Suing a foreign country may present legal challenges for the Democrats, in part because other nations have immunity from most U.S. lawsuits. The DNC’s complaint argues Russia is not entitled to the protection because the hack constituted a trespass on the party’s private property.

The lawsuit argues that Russia is not entitled to sovereign immunity in this case because “the DNC claims arise out of Russia’s trespass on to the DNC’s private servers . . . in order to steal trade secrets and commit economic espionage.”

The lawsuit echoes a similar legal tactic that the Democratic Party used during the Watergate scandal. In 1972, the DNC filed suit against then-President Richard Nixon’s reelection committee seeking $1 million in damages for the break-in at Democratic headquarters in the Watergate building.

The suit was denounced at the time by Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, who called it a case of “sheer demagoguery” by the DNC. But the civil action brought by the DNC’s then-chairman, Lawrence F. O’Brien, was ultimately successful, yielding a $750,000 settlement from the Nixon campaign that was reached on the day in 1974 that Nixon left office.

The suit filed Friday seeks millions of dollars in compensation to offset damage it claims the party suffered from the hacks. The DNC argues that the cyberattack undermined its ability to communicate with voters, collect donations and operate effectively as its employees faced personal harassment and, in some cases, death threats.

The suit also seeks an acknowledgment from the defendants that they conspired to infiltrate the Democrats’ computers, steal information and disseminate it to influence the election.

To support its case, the lawsuit offers a detailed narrative of the DNC hacks, as well as episodes in which key Trump aides are alleged to have been told Russia held damaging information about Clinton.

[Inside Trump’s financial ties to Russia and his unusual flattery of Vladimir Putin]

Russia engaged in a “brazen attack on U.S. soil” the party alleges, a campaign that began with the cyberhack of its computer networks in 2015 and 2016. Trump campaign officials received repeated outreach from Russia, the suit says.

“Rather than report these repeated messages and communications that Russia intended to interfere in the U.S. election, the Trump campaign and its agents gleefully welcomed Russia’s help,” the party argues

Ultimately, Trump’s associates entered into an agreement with Russian agents “to promote Donald Trump’s candidacy through illegal means,” the suit concludes.

The suit does not name Trump as a defendant. Instead, it targets various Trump aides who met with people believed to be affiliated with Russia during the campaign, including the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., his son-in-law Jared Kushner, his campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Manafort’s deputy, Rick Gates.

Manafort and Gates were charged with money-laundering, fraud and tax evasion in a case brought by special prosecutors last year. In February, Gates pleaded guilty to conspiracy and lying to the FBI and is cooperating with investigators. Manafort has pleaded not guilty.

The DNC lawsuit also names as a defendant the Russian military intelligence service, the GRU, which has been accused by the U.S. government of orchestrating the hacks, as well as WikiLeaks, which published the DNC’s stolen emails, and the group’s founder Julian Assange.

The lawsuit was also filed against Roger Stone, the longtime Trump confidante who claimed during the campaign that he was in contact with Assange.

[Roger Stone claimed contact with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in 2016, according to two associates]

The Trump advisers and associates have denied assisting Russia in its hacking campaign. Stone has denied any communication with Assange or advance knowledge of the document dumps by WikiLeaks, saying his comments about Assange were jokes or exaggerations.

The DNC lawsuit argues that the Russian government and the GRU violated a series of laws by orchestrating the secret intrusion into the Democrats’ computer systems, including statutes to protect trade secrets, prohibit wire tapping and prevent trespassing.

The party said the Trump defendants committed conspiracy through their interaction with Russian agents and their public encouragement of the hacking, with the campaign itself acting as a racketeering enterprise promoting illegal activity.

The complaint was filed on behalf of the party by the law firm of Cohen Milstein.

The suit contains previously undisclosed details, including that the specific date when the Russians breached the DNC computer system: July 27, 2015, according to forensic evidence cited in the filing.

The analysis shows the system was breached again on April 18, 2016. The hackers began siphoning documents and information from DNC systems on April 22. The suit notes that four days later, Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos was informed by Josef Mifsud, a London-based professor, that the Russians were in possession of thousands of emails that could be damaging to Clinton.

[Top campaign officials knew of Trump adviser’s outreach to Russia]

The list of defendants in the suit includes Papadopoulos and Mifsud, as well as Aras and Emin Agalarov, the wealthy Russian father and son who hosted the Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow in 2013. Trump, who owned the pageant, attended the event.

The Agalarovs also played a role in arranging a meeting for a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower in New York in 2016, at which Donald Trump Jr. had expected to be given damaging information about Clinton.

Scott Balber, an attorney for the Agalarovs, said the allegations about his clients were “frivolous” and “a publicity stunt.”

“They had absolutely nothing to do with any alleged hacking of any Democratic computer system or any interference in the US election.”

The suit alleges that Trump’s personal and professional ties to Russia helped foster the conspiracy.

The DNC’s lawyers wrote that “long standing personal professional and financial ties to Russia and numerous individuals linked to the Russian government provided fertile ground for a conspiracy between the defendants to interfere in the 2016 elections.”

The lawsuit describes how the then-Soviet Union paid for Trump to travel Moscow in the 1980s.

It also details the history of Manafort and Gates, who worked for Russian-friendly factions in the Ukraine before joining the Trump campaign. Prosecutors have said they were in contact in 2016 with Konstantin Kilimnik, a former linguist in the Russian army who the FBI has alleged had ties to Russian intelligence.

Alice Crites contributed to this report.


******************************************************************************************************


ARRESTED BLACK MEN SPEAK OUT ON THE PHILADELPHIA EVENTS

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/starbucks-arrest-rashon-nelson-donte-robinson-feared-for-their-lives/
CBS/AP April 19, 2018, 9:04 AM
Black men arrested at Philadelphia Starbucks say they feared for their lives

PHILADELPHIA -- Rashon Nelson initially brushed it off when the Starbucks manager told him he couldn't use the restroom because he wasn't a paying customer. He thought nothing of it when he and his business partner, Donte Robinson, were approached at their table and were asked if they needed help. The 23-year-old entrepreneurs declined, explaining they were just waiting for a business meeting.

A few minutes later, they hardly noticed when the police walked into the coffee shop -- until officers started walking in their direction.

"That's when we knew she called the police on us," Nelson told The Associated Press in the men's first interview since video of their April 12 arrests went viral.

Starbucks Black Men Arrested

In this Wednesday, April 18, 2018 photo, Rashon Nelson, left, and Donte Robinson, right, listen to a reporter's question during an interview with The Associated Press in Philadelphia. JACQUELINE LARMA / AP

Nelson and Robinson, black men who became best friends in the fourth grade, were taken in handcuffs from the Starbucks in Philadelphia's tony Rittenhouse Square neighborhood, where Robinson has been a customer since he was 15.

The video, recorded on a white customer's cellphone video, galvanized people around the country who saw the exchange as modern-day racism. In the week since, the men have met with Starbucks' CEO and have started pushing for lasting changes to ensure what happened to them doesn't happen to anyone else.

"We were there for a real reason, a real deal that we were working on," Robinson explained. "We put in a lot of time, energy, effort. ... We were at a moment that could have a positive impact on a whole ladder of people, lives, families. So I was like, 'No, you're not stopping that right now.'"

Robinson said he thought about his loved ones and how the afternoon had taken such a turn as he was taken to jail. Nelson wondered if he'd make it home alive.

"Anytime I'm encountered by cops, I can honestly say it's a thought that runs through my mind," Nelson said. "You never know what's going to happen."

"CBS This Morning" co-host Gayle King sat down with Starbucks' executive chairman Howard Schultz on Wednesday to discuss how the company is handling the incident.

"I'm embarrassed, ashamed. I think what occurred was reprehensible at every single level. I think I take it very personally as everyone in our company does and we're committed to making it right. The announcement we made yesterday about closing our stores, 8,000 stores closed, to do significant training with our people is just the beginning of what we will do to transform the way we do business and educate our people on unconscious bias," Schultz said.

Democratic Mayor Jim Kenney, who is white, said what happened at the Starbucks "appears to exemplify what racial discrimination looks like in 2018." Police Commissioner Richard Ross, who's black, said in a Facebook post that arresting officers "did absolutely nothing wrong," and added that Nelson and Robinson were disrespectful to officers.

Ross said officers did what they were supposed to do and were professional in their dealings with the men, "and instead they got the opposite back."

Nelson and Robinson originally were supposed to meet Andrew Yaffe, a white local businessman, at a Starbucks across town. But the plan changed, and they agreed to meet at the Rittenhouse Square location, where they'd met several times before on a potential real estate opportunity.

The black men arrived a few minutes early. Three police officers showed up not long after.

Nelson said they weren't questioned but were told to leave immediately.

Yaffe showed up as the men were being handcuffed. He can be seen in the video demanding an explanation for the officers' actions. Nelson and Robinson did not resist arrest, confused and unsure of what to think or what might happen next.

"When you know that you did nothing wrong, how do you really react to it?" Nelson said. "You can either be ignorant or you can show some type of sophistication and act like you have class. That was the choice we had."

It was hardly their first encounter with police, a rite of passage that becomes a regular occurrence for many black men their age. But neither had been arrested before, setting them apart from many of their peers in the gritty southwest Philadelphia neighborhood where they grew up.

Robinson briefly wondered what he might've done to bring the moment on himself.

"I feel like I fell short," he explained. "I'm trying to think of something I did wrong, to put not just me but my brother, my lifelong friend ... in this situation."

Attorney Stewart Cohen, representing Nelson and Robinson, said the men were illegally profiled. He pointed to Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race in hotels, restaurants, theaters and other public accommodations.

Seattle-based Starbucks Corp. has said the location where the arrests occurred has a policy that restrooms are for paying customers only.

In audio recordings released by police Wednesday, the employee who called 911 can be heard telling the operator, "I have two gentlemen in my cafe that are refusing to make a purchase or leave." In a subsequent communication between police and dispatch, someone says "we have a disturbance at the Starbucks" and refers to "a group of males inside causing a disturbance," and additional officers are sent. The Starbucks employee never called it a disturbance.

Nelson and Robinson spent hours in a jail cell with no outside contact and no sense of what would happen next. They were released after midnight, when the district attorney declined to prosecute them for trespassing. They had no idea the video of their arrests was making the rounds on the internet.

The day after their arrests, they thought about what to do next.

"You go from being someone who's just trying to be an entrepreneur, having your own dreams and aspirations, and then this happens," Nelson said. "How do you handle it? Do you stand up? Do you fight? Do you sit down and just watch everyone else fight for you? Do you let it slide, like we let everything else slide with injustice?"

Robinson, still focused on the previous day's business deal, called Yaffe to reschedule. Yaffe told him about the video and the traction it had gotten.

Over the weekend, attention and outrage over the video grew, prompting a protest at the local Starbucks restaurant and a national boycott. By Monday, the men were set to meet with Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson to discuss what happened.

Johnson has responded quickly to public outcry around the arrests, calling them "reprehensible," apologizing and ordering stores closed for mandatory training to tackle unconscious bias.

Nelson and Robinson said they're looking for more lasting results and are in mediation proceedings with Starbucks to implement changes, including the posting in stores of a customer bill of rights; the adoption of new policies regarding customer ejections, racial profiling and racial discrimination; and independent investigations of complaints of profiling or discrimination from customers and employees.

Robinson said he appreciates the public support the men have received but anger and boycotting Starbucks are not the solution.

"We need a different type of action ... not words," he said. "It's a time to pay attention and understand what's really going on. We do want a seat at the table."

© 2018 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.


I’M GLAD TO SEE THAT COMMISSIONER ROSS HAS BECOME AWARE THAT HIS COMMENTS – ESSENTIALLY THAT HIS OFFICERS “DID NOTHING WRONG” – WERE IN ERROR. WHEN I FIRST HEARD THIS STORY LAST WEEK, IT DIDN’T SOUND AS THOUGH ANY GREAT DEAL OF EFFORT HAD BEEN PUT INTO FINDING OUT WHAT THE ACTUAL PROBLEM WAS. ALSO, THE NEWS REPORT STATED THAT THE “SUSPECTS” WERE NOT POLITE TO THE OFFICERS. THE LITTLE BIT OF VIDEO THAT WAS SHOWN WITH THE REPORT SHOWED NO INTERACTION OF ANY KIND BETWEEN OFFICERS AND THE TWO MEN THAT I WAS ABLE TO SEE.

NOT WISHING TO RUB SALT INTO THIS WOUND, I WOULD SIMPLY SAY THAT EVERY TIME I SEE AN ARTICLE (AND I SEE A LOT, BECAUSE I DO A DAILY NEWS BLOG FEATURING EACH STORY) IMPLYING THAT POLICE VIOLENCE WAS USED BECAUSE SOMEONE “FAILED TO OBEY ORDERS,” I ASK MYSELF HOW THE SUSPECT WAS APPROACHED BY THE OFFICER, AND WHAT MEASURES WERE TAKEN TO TAKE CARE OF THE SITUATION WITHOUT RESORTING TO “USE OF FORCE.”

I WILL ALSO SAY AGAIN, THAT EVERY TIME AN OFFICER IS QUOTED AS SAYING “I FEARED FOR MY LIFE,” I AM DOUBLY UNTRUSTING. IT’S NOT THAT I “DON’T LIKE COPS,” BUT THAT OFFICERS NEED TO BE MORE LIKE THE HUMANS THEY DEAL WITH; THEY SHOULD BE SUSPENDED AT THE VERY LEAST FOR EACH SHOOTING; CHARGED WITH A CRIME FOR EVERY UNNECESSARY KILLING; SHOULD NEVER GO INTO A HOME WHERE A PERSON WITH A MENTAL PROBLEM WAS REPORTED AND MORE OR LESS JUST “START SHOOTING.” THEY SHOULD CALL AN AMBULANCE, WHERE SOMEONE SHOULD BE TRAINED IN CARING FOR THE MENTALLY ILL. A GOOD TRANQUILIZER SHOT MIGHT SOLVE THE PROBLEM.

https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/Richard-Ross-Starbucks-Arrest-480268813.html
Philadelphia Police Commissioner Richard Ross Says 'I Failed Miserably' While Addressing Starbucks Arrests Caught on Camera
Commissioner Richard Ross is apologizing and offering new policies in the Center City coffee shop arrests
By Dan Stamm
Published 6 hours ago | Updated 4 minutes ago

video -- An apology and a policy change came from Philadelphia Police Commissioner Richard Ross after he said he handled the situation wrong. Now, backlash remains growing as protests and rallies are planned.
(Published 20 minutes ago)

Philadelphia's police commissioner and mayor apologized on Thursday to two black men who were arrested at a Starbucks in Center City last week.

Commissioner Richard Ross, who is black, previously staunchly defended police for their handling of the incident.

Ross says that he made the situation worse and "failed miserably" in the messaging around the arrests.

Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson were sitting in the Rittenhouse Square store for a few minutes last Thursday when they were approached by police. A few minutes later, they were arrested. Video of the arrests sparked nationwide outrage.

Raw Video: Philly Police Commissioner Apologizes for Talk of Starbucks Arrests

Philadelphia Police Commissioner took personal responsibility for his messaging around the arrests of two young black men inside a Center City Starbucks. He is calling for policy changes and apologizing to the men taken out of the store in handcuffs.(Published 4 hours ago)

Ross says that the issue of race is not lost on him and he shouldn't be the person making things worse.

"I am flawed like many other folks but that is still no excuse," Ross said.

He also apologized for not knowing Starbucks policy and said he was unaware that you don't have to buy something to sit in the coffee shop.

Men Arrested at Philly Starbucks Speak Out, Call for Change

"I just think that as we work to make this city safer and better we do have to acknowledge that there are still things that we need to work on," Ross said. "It starts at the top and that starts with me. Messaging is important and I failed miserably in this regard."

Later Thursday, Democratic Mayor Jim Kenney joined Ross in apologizing to the men.

"I want to acknowledge their pain and the pain of so many others, and commit our city to healing it together over the coming days, weeks and months," the mayor's statement read in part.

Men Arrested at Philly Starbucks Speak Out[PHI] Men Arrested at Philly Starbucks Speak Out

The two men arrested in a Center City Philadelphia Starbucks are speaking out a week after the encounter as protests move from the store the incident occurred inside to Philadelphia Police Headquarters.(Published 6 hours ago)

Kenney, who is white, commended Ross for his "ability to reflect on this very difficult week, and to articulate his changed perspective."

Ross said the arresting officer is mortified and was put into an unfortunate circumstance. He says the officers and men didn't see eye-to-eye during the about 10-minute exchange.

He says the police department did not have a policy for dealing for similar situations, but does now. He says it will be released soon.

What 'Unconscious Bias' Really Is and Its Exhausting Effect

"The current realities of race relations and bias in 2018 warrant ongoing re-evaluations by each and every one of us," Kenney's statement said.

Copyright Associated Press / NBC 10 Philadelphia



“I FEARED FOR MY LIFE,” SAYS ONE POLICE OFFICER AFTER ANOTHER, IF HE ACTUALLY IS CHARGED IN THE UNLAWFUL DEATH OF A CITIZEN. THEY SAY THAT TO THE JUDGE AND JURY, WHO ALL OPERATE UNDER THE UNSPOKEN RULE FOR POLICEMEN, THAT THE OFFICER MUST CERTAINLY GET THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT. EVEN IF THE OFFICER IS CONVICTED, HIS PENALTY WILL BE A SMALL ONE. THIS IS UNCONSCIOUS BIAS.

SECONDLY, THE COMMISSIONER SAID THAT THE BLACK MEN WERE “DISRESPECTFUL” TO THE OFFICERS. THERE IS NO QUOTATION OF WHAT THE CUSTOMERS ARE SUPPOSED TO HAVE SAID, HOWEVER.

https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/Unconscious-Bias-Implicit-Bias-Philadelphia-Starbucks-Exhausting-Effect-480146723.html
What 'Unconscious Bias' Really Is and Its Exhausting Effect
What does the term 'unconscious bias' really mean? And does it even apply to the now-notorious Starbucks arrests in Philadelphia?
By Brian X. McCrone
Published at 7:12 PM EDT on Apr 18, 2018

First, say sorry. Second, promise new training.

That's how Starbucks executives went about their apology tour of Philadelphia after arriving Sunday. Three days earlier, a store manager at one of their Center City locations had called police on two black men who were waiting for a colleague to talk business.

Their subsequent arrests became a national embarrassment for the coffee titan. So CEO Kevin Johnson and COO Rosalind Brewer came to Philly to apologize to the two men, whose lawyer then issued a brief statement. Starbucks and the men are now "engaged in constructive discussions" to make the incident "a vehicle for positive social change."

The executives also said the company would require all of its employees to undergo "unconscious bias training." On Tuesday, Starbucks said its 8,000 stores in the United States would close May 29 for a day of training.

WHAT METHODS FAIL AND WHICH ONES SUCCEED? A LITTLE INFORMATION FOR THE STARBUCKS TEAM.

https://hbr.org/2016/07/why-diversity-programs-fail
Why Diversity Programs Fail
Frank Dobbin Alexandra Kalev
FROM THE JULY–AUGUST 2016 ISSUE

Businesses started caring a lot more about diversity after a series of high-profile lawsuits rocked the financial industry. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Morgan Stanley shelled out $54 million—and Smith Barney and Merrill Lynch more than $100 million each—to settle sex discrimination claims. In 2007, Morgan was back at the table, facing a new class action, which cost the company $46 million. In 2013, Bank of America Merrill Lynch settled a race discrimination suit for $160 million. Cases like these brought Merrill’s total 15-year payout to nearly half a billion dollars.

It’s no wonder that Wall Street firms now require new hires to sign arbitration contracts agreeing not to join class actions. They have also expanded training and other diversity programs. But on balance, equality isn’t improving in financial services or elsewhere. Although the proportion of managers at U.S. commercial banks who were Hispanic rose from 4.7% in 2003 to 5.7% in 2014, white women’s representation dropped from 39% to 35%, and black men’s from 2.5% to 2.3%. The numbers were even worse in investment banks (though that industry is shrinking, which complicates the analysis). Among all U.S. companies with 100 or more employees, the proportion of black men in management increased just slightly—from 3% to 3.3%—from 1985 to 2014. White women saw bigger gains from 1985 to 2000—rising from 22% to 29% of managers—but their numbers haven’t budged since then. Even in Silicon Valley, where many leaders tout the need to increase diversity for both business and social justice reasons, bread-and-butter tech jobs remain dominated by white men.

It shouldn’t be surprising that most diversity programs aren’t increasing diversity. Despite a few new bells and whistles, courtesy of big data, companies are basically doubling down on the same approaches they’ve used since the 1960s—which often make things worse, not better. Firms have long relied on diversity training to reduce bias on the job, hiring tests and performance ratings to limit it in recruitment and promotions, and grievance systems to give employees a way to challenge managers. Those tools are designed to preempt lawsuits by policing managers’ thoughts and actions. Yet laboratory studies show that this kind of force-feeding can activate bias rather than stamp it out. As social scientists have found, people often rebel against rules to assert their autonomy. Try to coerce me to do X, Y, or Z, and I’ll do the opposite just to prove that I’m my own person.

In analyzing three decades’ worth of data from more than 800 U.S. firms and interviewing hundreds of line managers and executives at length, we’ve seen that companies get better results when they ease up on the control tactics. It’s more effective to engage managers in solving the problem, increase their on-the-job contact with female and minority workers, and promote social accountability—the desire to look fair-minded. That’s why interventions such as targeted college recruitment, mentoring programs, self-managed teams, and task forces have boosted diversity in businesses. Some of the most effective solutions aren’t even designed with diversity in mind.

Here, we dig into the data, the interviews, and company examples to shed light on what doesn’t work and what does.

Why You Can’t Just Outlaw Bias

Executives favor a classic command-and-control approach to diversity because it boils expected behaviors down to dos and don’ts that are easy to understand and defend. Yet this approach also flies in the face of nearly everything we know about how to motivate people to make changes. Decades of social science research point to a simple truth: You won’t get managers on board by blaming and shaming them with rules and reeducation. Let’s look at how the most common top-down efforts typically go wrong.

Diversity training.

Do people who undergo training usually shed their biases? Researchers have been examining that question since before World War II, in nearly a thousand studies. It turns out that while people are easily taught to respond correctly to a questionnaire about bias, they soon forget the right answers. The positive effects of diversity training rarely last beyond a day or two, and a number of studies suggest that it can activate bias or spark a backlash. Nonetheless, nearly half of midsize companies use it, as do nearly all the Fortune 500.

R1607C_DOBBIN_DIVERSITY_A.png
Find this and other HBR graphics in our VISUAL LIBRARY

Many firms see adverse effects. One reason is that three-quarters use negative messages in their training. By headlining the legal case for diversity and trotting out stories of huge settlements, they issue an implied threat: “Discriminate, and the company will pay the price.” We understand the temptation—that’s how we got your attention in the first paragraph—but threats, or “negative incentives,” don’t win converts.

Another reason is that about three-quarters of firms with training still follow the dated advice of the late diversity guru R. Roosevelt Thomas Jr. “If diversity management is strategic to the organization,” he used to say, diversity training must be mandatory, and management has to make it clear that “if you can’t deal with that, then we have to ask you to leave.” But five years after instituting required training for managers, companies saw no improvement in the proportion of white women, black men, and Hispanics in management, and the share of black women actually decreased by 9%, on average, while the ranks of Asian-American men and women shrank by 4% to 5%. Trainers tell us that people often respond to compulsory courses with anger and resistance—and many participants actually report more animosity toward other groups afterward.

But voluntary training evokes the opposite response (“I chose to show up, so I must be pro-diversity”), leading to better results: increases of 9% to 13% in black men, Hispanic men, and Asian-American men and women in management five years out (with no decline in white or black women). Research from the University of Toronto reinforces our findings: In one study white subjects read a brochure critiquing prejudice toward blacks. When people felt pressure to agree with it, the reading strengthened their bias against blacks. When they felt the choice was theirs, the reading reduced bias.

Companies too often signal that training is remedial. The diversity manager at a national beverage company told us that the top brass uses it to deal with problem groups. “If there are a number of complaints…or, God forbid, some type of harassment case…leaders say, ‘Everyone in the business unit will go through it again.’” Most companies with training have special programs for managers. To be sure, they’re a high-risk group because they make the hiring, promotion, and pay decisions. But singling them out implies that they’re the worst culprits. Managers tend to resent that implication and resist the message.

Hiring tests.

Some 40% of companies now try to fight bias with mandatory hiring tests assessing the skills of candidates for frontline jobs. But managers don’t like being told that they can’t hire whomever they please, and our research suggests that they often use the tests selectively. Back in the 1950s, following the postwar migration of blacks northward, Swift & Company, Chicago meatpackers, instituted tests for supervisor and quality-checking jobs. One study found managers telling blacks that they had failed the test and then promoting whites who hadn’t been tested. A black machine operator reported: “I had four years at Englewood High School. I took an exam for a checker’s job. The foreman told me I failed” and gave the job to a white man who “didn’t take the exam.”

This kind of thing still happens. When we interviewed the new HR director at a West Coast food company, he said he found that white managers were making only strangers—most of them minorities—take supervisor tests and hiring white friends without testing them. “If you are going to test one person for this particular job title,” he told us, “you need to test everybody.”

But even managers who test everyone applying for a position may ignore the results. Investment banks and consulting firms build tests into their job interviews, asking people to solve math and scenario-based problems on the spot. While studying this practice, Kellogg professor Lauren Rivera played a fly on the wall during hiring meetings at one firm. She found that the team paid little attention when white men blew the math test but close attention when women and blacks did. Because decision makers (deliberately or not) cherry-picked results, the testing amplified bias rather than quashed it.

Managers made only strangers—most of them minorities—take tests and hired white friends without testing them.

Companies that institute written job tests for managers—about 10% have them today—see decreases of 4% to 10% in the share of managerial jobs held by white women, African-American men and women, Hispanic men and women, and Asian-American women over the next five years. There are significant declines among white and Asian-American women—groups with high levels of education, which typically score well on standard managerial tests. So group differences in test-taking skills don’t explain the pattern.

Performance ratings.

More than 90% of midsize and large companies use annual performance ratings to ensure that managers make fair pay and promotion decisions. Identifying and rewarding the best workers isn’t the only goal—the ratings also provide a litigation shield. Companies sued for discrimination often claim that their performance rating systems prevent biased treatment.

But studies show that raters tend to lowball women and minorities in performance reviews. And some managers give everyone high marks to avoid hassles with employees or to keep their options open when handing out promotions. However managers work around performance systems, the bottom line is that ratings don’t boost diversity. When companies introduce them, there’s no effect on minority managers over the next five years, and the share of white women in management drops by 4%, on average.

Grievance procedures.

This last tactic is meant to identify and rehabilitate biased managers. About half of midsize and large firms have systems through which employees can challenge pay, promotion, and termination decisions. But many managers—rather than change their own behavior or address discrimination by others—try to get even with or belittle employees who complain. Among the nearly 90,000 discrimination complaints made to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2015, 45% included a charge of retaliation—which suggests that the original report was met with ridicule, demotion, or worse.

Diversity as Strategy
HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT MAGAZINE ARTICLE David A. Thomas

IBM expanded minority markets dramatically by promoting diversity in its own workforce. The result: a virtuous [sic] circle of growth and progress.

Once people see that a grievance system isn’t warding off bad behavior in their organization, they may become less likely to speak up. Indeed, employee surveys show that most people don’t report discrimination. This leads to another unintended consequence: Managers who receive few complaints conclude that their firms don’t have a problem. We see this a lot in our interviews. When we talked with the vice president of HR at an electronics firm, she mentioned the widely publicized “difficulties other corporations are having” and added, “We have not had any of those problems…we have gone almost four years without any kind of discrimination complaint!” What’s more, lab studies show that protective measures like grievance systems lead people to drop their guard and let bias affect their decisions, because they think company policies will guarantee fairness.

Things don’t get better when firms put in formal grievance systems; they get worse. Our quantitative analyses show that the managerial ranks of white women and all minority groups except Hispanic men decline—by 3% to 11%—in the five years after companies adopt them.

Still, most employers feel they need some sort of system to intercept complaints, if only because judges like them. One strategy that is gaining ground is the “flexible” complaint system, which offers not only a formal hearing process but also informal mediation. Since an informal resolution doesn’t involve hauling the manager before a disciplinary body, it may reduce retaliation. As we’ll show, making managers feel accountable without subjecting them to public rebuke tends to help.

Tools for Getting Managers on Board

If these popular solutions backfire, then what can employers do instead to promote diversity?

A number of companies have gotten consistently positive results with tactics that don’t focus on control. They apply three basic principles: engage managers in solving the problem, expose them to people from different groups, and encourage social accountability for change.

Engagement.

When someone’s beliefs and behavior are out of sync, that person experiences what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance.” Experiments show that people have a strong tendency to “correct” dissonance by changing either the beliefs or the behavior. So, if you prompt them to act in ways that support a particular view, their opinions shift toward that view. Ask them to write an essay defending the death penalty, and even the penalty’s staunch opponents will come to see some merits. When managers actively help boost diversity in their companies, something similar happens: They begin to think of themselves as diversity champions.

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Find this and other HBR graphics in our VISUAL LIBRARY

Take college recruitment programs targeting women and minorities. Our interviews suggest that managers willingly participate when invited. That’s partly because the message is positive: “Help us find a greater variety of promising employees!” And involvement is voluntary: Executives sometimes single out managers they think would be good recruiters, but they don’t drag anyone along at gunpoint.

Managers who make college visits say they take their charge seriously. They are determined to come back with strong candidates from underrepresented groups—female engineers, for instance, or African-American management trainees. Cognitive dissonance soon kicks in—and managers who were wishy-washy about diversity become converts.

The effects are striking. Five years after a company implements a college recruitment program targeting female employees, the share of white women, black women, Hispanic women, and Asian-American women in its management rises by about 10%, on average. A program focused on minority recruitment increases the proportion of black male managers by 8% and black female managers by 9%.

Mentoring is another way to engage managers and chip away at their biases. In teaching their protégés the ropes and sponsoring them for key training and assignments, mentors help give their charges the breaks they need to develop and advance. The mentors then come to believe that their protégés merit these opportunities—whether they’re white men, women, or minorities. That is cognitive dissonance—“Anyone I sponsor must be deserving”—at work again.

While white men tend to find mentors on their own, women and minorities more often need help from formal programs. One reason, as Georgetown’s business school dean David Thomas discovered in his research on mentoring, is that white male executives don’t feel comfortable reaching out informally to young women and minority men. Yet they are eager to mentor assigned protégés, and women and minorities are often first to sign up for mentors.

Mentoring programs make companies’ managerial echelons significantly more diverse: On average they boost the representation of black, Hispanic, and Asian-American women, and Hispanic and Asian-American men, by 9% to 24%. In industries where plenty of college-educated nonmanagers are eligible to move up, like chemicals and electronics, mentoring programs also increase the ranks of white women and black men by 10% or more.

Only about 15% of firms have special college recruitment programs for women and minorities, and only 10% have mentoring programs. Once organizations try them out, though, the upside becomes clear. Consider how these programs helped Coca-Cola in the wake of a race discrimination suit settled in 2000 for a record $193 million. With guidance from a court-appointed external task force, executives in the North America group got involved in recruitment and mentoring initiatives for professionals and middle managers, working specifically toward measurable goals for minorities. Even top leaders helped to recruit and mentor, and talent-sourcing partners were required to broaden their recruitment efforts. After five years, according to former CEO and chairman Neville Isdell, 80% of all mentees had climbed at least one rung in management. Both individual and group mentoring were open to all races but attracted large numbers of African-Americans (who accounted for 36% of protégés). These changes brought important gains. From 2000 to 2006, African-Americans’ representation among salaried employees grew from 19.7% to 23%, and Hispanics’ from 5.5% to 6.4%. And while African-Americans and Hispanics respectively made up 12% and 4.9% of professionals and middle managers in 2002, just four years later those figures had risen to 15.5% and 5.9%.

This began a virtuous cycle. Today, Coke looks like a different company. This February, Atlanta Tribune magazine profiled 17 African-American women in VP roles and above at Coke, including CFO Kathy Waller.

Contact.

Evidence that contact between groups can lessen bias first came to light in an unplanned experiment on the European front during World War II. The U.S. army was still segregated, and only whites served in combat roles. High casualties left General Dwight Eisenhower understaffed, and he asked for black volunteers for combat duty. When Harvard sociologist Samuel Stouffer, on leave at the War Department, surveyed troops on their racial attitudes, he found that whites whose companies had been joined by black platoons showed dramatically lower racial animus and greater willingness to work alongside blacks than those whose companies remained segregated. Stouffer concluded that whites fighting alongside blacks came to see them as soldiers like themselves first and foremost. The key, for Stouffer, was that whites and blacks had to be working toward a common goal as equals—hundreds of years of close contact during and after slavery hadn’t dampened bias.

Business practices that generate this kind of contact across groups yield similar results. Take self-managed teams, which allow people in different roles and functions to work together on projects as equals. Such teams increase contact among diverse types of people, because specialties within firms are still largely divided along racial, ethnic, and gender lines. For example, women are more likely than men to work in sales, whereas white men are more likely to be in tech jobs and management, and black and Hispanic men are more likely to be in production.

As in Stouffer’s combat study, working side-by-side breaks down stereotypes, which leads to more equitable hiring and promotion. At firms that create self-managed work teams, the share of white women, black men and women, and Asian-American women in management rises by 3% to 6% over five years.

The Downside of the Diversity Label
Why can mentoring, self-managed teams, and cross-training increase diversity without the backlash prompted by mandatory training? One reason may be that these programs aren’t usually branded as diversity efforts. Diversity language in company policy can stress white men out, as researchers at UC Santa Barbara and the University of Washington found when they put young white men through a simulated job interview—half of them for a company that touted its commitment to diversity, and half for a company that did not. In the explicitly pro-diversity company, subjects expected discrimination against whites, showed cardiovascular distress, and did markedly worse in the taped interview.

Rotating management trainees through departments is another way to increase contact. Typically, this kind of cross-training allows people to try their hand at various jobs and deepen their understanding of the whole organization. But it also has a positive impact on diversity, because it exposes both department heads and trainees to a wider variety of people. The result, we’ve seen, is a bump of 3% to 7% in white women, black men and women, and Asian-American men and women in management.

About a third of U.S. firms have self-managed teams for core operations, and nearly four-fifths use cross-training, so these tools are already available in many organizations. Though college recruitment and mentoring have a bigger impact on diversity—perhaps because they activate engagement in the diversity mission and create intergroup contact—every bit helps. Self-managed teams and cross-training have had more positive effects than mandatory diversity training, performance evaluations, job testing, or grievance procedures, which are supposed to promote diversity.

Social accountability.

The third tactic, encouraging social accountability, plays on our need to look good in the eyes of those around us. It is nicely illustrated by an experiment conducted in Israel. Teachers in training graded identical compositions attributed to Jewish students with Ashkenazic names (European heritage) or with Sephardic names (African or Asian heritage). Sephardic students typically come from poorer families and do worse in school. On average, the teacher trainees gave the Ashkenazic essays Bs and the Sephardic essays Ds. The difference evaporated, however, when trainees were told that they would discuss their grades with peers. The idea that they might have to explain their decisions led them to judge the work by its quality.

In the workplace you’ll see a similar effect. Consider this field study conducted by Emilio Castilla of MIT’s Sloan School of Management: A firm found it consistently gave African-Americans smaller raises than whites, even when they had identical job titles and performance ratings. So Castilla suggested transparency to activate social accountability. The firm posted each unit’s average performance rating and pay raise by race and gender. Once managers realized that employees, peers, and superiors would know which parts of the company favored whites, the gap in raises all but disappeared.

Corporate diversity task forces help promote social accountability. CEOs usually assemble these teams, inviting department heads to volunteer and including members of underrepresented groups. Every quarter or two, task forces look at diversity numbers for the whole company, for business units, and for departments to figure out what needs attention.

After investigating where the problems are—recruitment, career bottlenecks, and so on—task force members come up with solutions, which they then take back to their departments. They notice if their colleagues aren’t volunteering to mentor or showing up at recruitment events. Accountability theory suggests that having a task force member in a department will cause managers in it to ask themselves, “Will this look right?” when making hiring and promotion decisions.

Deloitte has seen how powerful social accountability can be. In 1992, Mike Cook, who was then the CEO, decided to try to stanch the hemorrhaging of female associates. Half the company’s hires were women, but nearly all of them left before they were anywhere near making partner. As Douglas McCracken, CEO of Deloitte’s consulting unit at the time, later recounted in HBR, Cook assembled a high-profile task force that “didn’t immediately launch a slew of new organizational policies aimed at outlawing bad behavior” but, rather, relied on transparency to get results.

The task force got each office to monitor the career progress of its women and set its own goals to address local problems. When it became clear that the CEO and other managing partners were closely watching, McCracken wrote, “women started getting their share of premier client assignments and informal mentoring.” And unit heads all over the country began getting questions from partners and associates about why things weren’t changing faster. An external advisory council issued annual progress reports, and individual managers chose change metrics to add to their own performance ratings. In eight years turnover among women dropped to the same level as turnover among men, and the proportion of female partners increased from 5% to 14%—the highest percentage among the big accounting firms. By 2015, 21% of Deloitte’s global partners were women, and in March of that year, Deloitte LLP appointed Cathy Engelbert as its CEO—making her the first woman to head a major accountancy.

Task forces are the trifecta of diversity programs. In addition to promoting accountability, they engage members who might have previously been cool to diversity projects and increase contact among the women, minorities, and white men who participate. They pay off, too: On average, companies that put in diversity task forces see 9% to 30% increases in the representation of white women and of each minority group in management over the next five years.

Once it was clear that top managers were watching, women started to get more premier assignments.

Diversity managers, too, boost inclusion by creating social accountability. To see why, let’s go back to the finding of the teacher-in-training experiment, which is supported by many studies: When people know they might have to explain their decisions, they are less likely to act on bias. So simply having a diversity manager who could ask them questions prompts managers to step back and consider everyone who is qualified instead of hiring or promoting the first people who come to mind. Companies that appoint diversity managers see 7% to 18% increases in all underrepresented groups—except Hispanic men—in management in the following five years. Those are the gains after accounting for both effective and ineffective programs they put in place.

Only 20% of medium and large employers have task forces, and just 10% have diversity managers, despite the benefits of both. Diversity managers cost money, but task forces use existing workers, so they’re a lot cheaper than some of the things that fail, such as mandatory training.

Leading companies like Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Facebook, and Google have placed big bets on accountability in the past couple of years. Expanding on Deloitte’s early example, they’re now posting complete diversity numbers for all to see. We should know in a few years if that moves the needle for them.

Strategies for controlling bias—which drive most diversity efforts—have failed spectacularly since they were introduced to promote equal opportunity. Black men have barely gained ground in corporate management since 1985. White women haven’t progressed since 2000. It isn’t that there aren’t enough educated women and minorities out there—both groups have made huge educational gains over the past two generations. The problem is that we can’t motivate people by forcing them to get with the program and punishing them if they don’t.

The numbers sum it up. Your organization will become less diverse, not more, if you require managers to go to diversity training, try to regulate their hiring and promotion decisions, and put in a legalistic grievance system.

The very good news is that we know what does work—we just need to do more of it.

A version of this article appeared in the July–August 2016 issue (pp.52–60) of Harvard Business Review.


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https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wendy-mogel-parenting-expert-how-to-better-communicate-with-your-kids/
To communicate better with your kids, change your perspective
CBS NEWS April 19, 2018, 1:29 PM

VIDEO -- CBS NEWS April 19, 2018, 1:29 PM

According to clinical psychologist Dr. Wendy Mogel, one of the keys to successful parenting lies in how you communicate. In her new book, "Voice Lessons for Parents: What to Say, How to Say it, and When to Listen," she discusses how your pitch, the tone of your voice, how fast you talk, and your body language all play an important role.

She says communication lapses can start early on.

"So our 4-year-old daughters are as articulate as any head of state on the planet, and we mistake their verbal sophistication for emotional maturity. They're still 4, they don't have much life experience, but they have tremendous vocabularies and a great passion for arguing you into any perspective they wish. They're like little, tiny attorneys. And the 4-year-old boys can barely talk yet," Mogel told "CBS This Morning."

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Mogel also addressed why the relationship between mothers and their teenage daughters is often the most fraught.

"What the teenage daughters do is they download all of their distress. And now everybody's so connected by technology, so they can just text mom distress all day long and then the mothers are in tremendous anguish about the daughter's problems….And they mistake the snapshot of their daughter for the epic movie of her life. So the mother's suffering. The daughter's fine. She handed it all over to mom and off she goes," Mogel said.

As for getting inside your kids' heads a little bit more, Mogel suggests looking at them from a whole new perspective – like an anthropologist might.

"You can think of your son as an exchange student from Kazakhstan," she suggested. "Then you think, let me find out the ways of these people and what they're interested in."

Mogel gave the example of trying to understand her son's fascination with watching people play video games instead of being outside with his friends. She said the distance also helps take the emotional investment out of the situation.

"You think of your daughter as a visiting niece from a distant state... instead of 'this child is me, the entire badge of my worth, everybody is judging me based on this teenage behavior,' and that gives them tremendous leverage over your self-esteem, you get desperate, and panic."

"Voice Lessons for Parents: What to Say, How to Say it, and When to Listen," is published by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, a division of CBS.

© 2018 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.


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THREE CLIENTS – MAYBE I’M THE ONE WHO’S ODD, BUT I CAN’T IMAGINE A LAWYER KEEPING A PRACTICE OPEN WITH ONLY THREE CLIENTS. THERE MAY BE MORE INFORMATION HERE. BUT WHAT INTERESTS ME MORE IS THE FACT THAT THE MAFIA BACKCOMB HAIR STYLE HELPS TO MAKE THE “MYSTERY MAN” LOOK A LITTLE LIKE STEVE BANNON. TRUMP AND BANNON HADN’T MET UNTIL THE LAST COUPLE OF YEARS, HOWEVER, OR SO ONE ARTICLE SAID. BESIDES, MAYBE BANNON ISN’T REALLY ALL THAT EVIL. HE AND HIS ALT-RIGHT PEOPLE WANT TO SEEM DARK AND DANGEROUS, AND THEY DO, BUT CRIMINAL THUGS? HOPEFULLY NOT.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/stormy-daniels-reveals-sketch-of-man-who-allegedly-threatened-her/
By BLAIR GUILD CBS NEWS April 17, 2018, 2:23 PM
Stormy Daniels reveals sketch of man who allegedly threatened her

Adult film star Stephanie Clifford, who uses the name Stormy Daniels, revealed a composite sketch of the man she claims threatened her and her daughter seven years ago. She believes the threat was connected to her alleged affair with President Trump. Clifford says a man approached her in a parking lot outside of a fitness center seven years ago and told her to "leave Trump alone."

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THE VIEW, ABC

"I'm done being bullied. I'm done," she said on ABC's The View Tuesday morning.

The sketch '[See website for image.] was created by a professional artist based on Clifford's memory. She and her lawyer Michael Avenatti are offering a $100,000 reward to anyone who can identify the man in the sketch. They set up an email address, "idthethug@gmail.com."

"What I do for a job does not impact my ability to know right from wrong, or to tell the truth," Daniels said.

Clifford is suing Mr. Trump to get out of a nondisclosure agreement regarding -her alleged sexual affair with the president in 2006.

Avenatti also said Tuesday that there is "no question" Mr. Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen will be indicted.

"There is no question in my mind that Michael Cohen is going to be indicted," he said, appearing alongside his client.

Clifford was in court Monday when Cohen's lawyers were forced to reveal the mystery identity of one of his three clients: Fox News host Sean Hannity.

Hannity had originally requested that his identity remain anonymous, and Cohen's lawyers tried to keep his name a secret after the FBI raided Cohen's office, hotel room, and home. However Judge Kimba Wood made one of the lawyers reveal his previously undisclosed identity in court.

"Clearly there are documents that have Sean Hannity's name on it in some capacity. Otherwise there would be no reason to bring this up," Avenatti said.

© 2018 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Blair Guild is a politics reporter and video producer for CBS News Digital.


Daryle Lamont Jenkins/Richard Spencer

http://deadline.com/2018/03/alt-right-age-of-rage-clip-sxsw-daryle-lamont-jenkins-richard-spencer-trump-1202315596/ EXCLUSIVE: Making its world premiere at SXSW, Adam Bhala Lough’s documentary Alt-Right: Age of Rage comes at a time when tensions between the left and the right are at an all-time high under the Trump administration. In this exclusive clip from the feature documentary, Lough puts the camera on activist Daryle Lamont Jenkins and alt-right leader Richard Spencer as they talk about their respective movements.
The far right Opinion
Why interviewing Richard Spencer was a risk worth taking
Gary Younge
Wed 8 Nov 2017 10.00 EST

Giving publicity to a white supremacist isn’t something I do lightly, but right now, ignoring him seems more dangerous than hopefully exposing him
Video -- Gary Younge interviews Richard Spencer: 'Africans have benefited from white supremacy' 2:59

On the last day of the probationary period of my first “job” in journalism, I had a problem. It was an international current affairs magazine programme, and I was taken on as an intern because I spoke foreign languages. In that capacity I had been asked to call the far-right Front National (FN) in France and invite then leader Jean-Marie Le Pen on the show. I wouldn’t do it.

I had two main reasons. The first was journalistic. At the time, the FN had about 12% of the vote and no seats in the legislature. We had the whole world to choose from. Why bother with these?

The second was moral. I felt strongly that we should not give these people airtime to peddle their divisive lies. They were not a group I simply had a political disagreement with. Their politics of discrimination and scapegoating were antithetical to democratic norms. The media, I felt, should not smooth their path to respectability by giving them a platform and treating them like everyone else. The prospect of creating a spectacle, which in turn attracts viewers and clicks, should not override an ethical responsibility to avoid spreading hate speech and offensive propaganda.

The risk was that in giving him time we legitimised him as acceptable mainstream actor and dignified his views

(When I shared these objections with my boss, I think he was irritated but also mildly amused. The stakes were low for both of us. It was a poorly paid position I’d been in for just a week; it turned out he wasn’t wedded to the idea in the first place.)

In July this year, I interviewed the American white supremacist Richard Spencer, for a documentary on the roots of white anxiety in America. In the course of our exchange he claims that Africans contributed nothing to civilisation (they started it), that Africans benefited from white supremacy (they didn’t) and that, since I’m black I cannot be British (I am). A clip of that interview that has now gone viral.

The most common response to that video has been a variation on the theme of physical retribution (“I can’t believe you didn’t punch him”; “I’d have punched him”; “Someone should punch him”). That’s not my style. But beyond that, many have raised the issue that I raised all those years ago – “Why give him a platform?” “Who stands to gain from this?” These are reasonable questions. Indeed I asked it myself, on camera, before I interviewed him, saying: “I’m quite conflicted about interviewing Richard Spencer. Ordinarily, giving someone like that oxygen is something I think journalists shouldn’t do.”

So why did I? Well, the primary reason was journalistic. The documentary seeks to unearth the roots of white anxiety in America and how that is affecting the nation’s politics. Given US president Donald Trump’s record of race-baiting it seemed like racism should be in the mix. There were some things we did take off the schedule – like an interview with the Ku Klux Klan – because we felt they did not represent anything significant. But Spencer seemed to have a different currency. He coined the term “alt-right” – a synonym for the extreme right. Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist at the time of the interview, used to run Breitbart News (and since his resignation from the post does again), which he boasted was a platform for the alt-right.

Unlike the FN in France 25 years ago, who were still quite small, it felt as though these far-right ideas had travelled quite rapidly from the margins to the mainstream, and were infecting the US body politic at the highest level. If these people were, as they claimed, providing the intellectual underpinning for the Trump administration, then it seemed to me it is more dangerous to ignore them than engage and hopefully expose them.

The fact that three weeks after the interview neo-Nazis and their fellow travellers, including Spencer, descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, leaving one dead and several injured as many chanted antisemitic and racist slogans, only confirmed the point.

Having established that we would interview him, the next question was: how. For the risk remains that in giving him time we legitimise him as acceptable mainstream actor and dignify his views as being both reasonable and credible.

Throughout this trip, and throughout my career, I have met many people with views I’ve found objectionable. My general strategy is to let people speak for themselves and faithfully relate what they say – challenging only factual inaccuracies – in the hope that I can draw out why they think what they think. To be as empathic as I can, in the hope that I can work out where they are coming from.

My travels in white America – a land of anxiety, division and pockets of pain

But it was my view, shared by the team, that this was different. Spencer’s supremacist views are well-known. So while we would put Spencer on camera, the aim would be to challenge his views not indulge them. The aim was to be civil but firm. My first question – “You want to create a nation of dispossessed white people. Is that right?” – was hardly a curveball.

What did we expect? From what we had seen before, he would appear charming and reasonable while giving his egregious and offensive views an intellectual gloss. He would find it in his own interests to be believable and engaging, and my task would be to get the mask to slip.

What we did not expect was that he would be ignorant, historically illiterate, incoherent and personally insulting. The reason I called time on the interview was because Spencer was spent – beyond baiting me, he had nothing to offer, and frankly, I had no desire to hang around a white supremacist conference a second longer than I had to.

I’ve become accustomed to 21st-century racism being far more sophisticated, and we were concerned about giving him a platform. We didn’t anticipate that he’d bring the gallows and the rope and finish the job himself in such ostentatious fashion. By the end of the interview I don’t think anybody is in any doubt about what his views are. The risk resides in whether, having seen the interview, people are more likely to identify with him and his views or less. On balance, given his performance and the response, we think it was a risk worth taking.

• Angry, White and American is on Channel 4 at 10pm, Thursday 9 November. Gary Younge is a Guardian columnist



https://theuglytruth.wordpress.com/2018/03/14/alt-right-ringleader-richard-spencer-we-tend-to-attract-the-mentally-ill/
‘Alt-Right’ Ringleader Richard Spencer– ‘We Tend to Attract the Mentally Ill’

The new documentary ‘Alt-Right: Age of Rage’ explores the violent rise of the ‘alt-right’ in America and how white nationalists feel emboldened under President Trump.

ed note–Yes, the Daily Beast is owned (or at least was) by Jane Harmon, an Israeli spy. Yes, it is over-the-top liberal and serves as a seek-and-destroy mechanism for conservative traditional values. This does not mean however that just because it is billed as such that therefore Spencer’s quote must be false. As the old saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day.

And likewise with Spencer’s statement concerning many alt-right/White Nationalist types being mentally ill. In the many decades I have been doing all this political business, I have personally witnessed with my own eyes and ears the template/profile that over and over again typifies the average white nationalist in percentages that run in the high 90s–alone, unmarried, childless, (or if they do have kids, they refuse to associate with dad in any manner) alcoholic, addicted to porn, under-educated, under-employed and looking for some ‘group’ to join in order to achieve some semblance of ‘family’ and sense of belonging. I have also seen how over and over again they are lured into doing stupid and illegal things that time and time again work in the interests of Judea, Inc in creating/maintaining a narrative that furthers the aims, interests and agenda of Zionism and of Jewish power.

One need look no further for validation of this than what is taking place now on a daily basis. The alt-right/WN neighborhood is now FRONT AND CENTER as the water carrier for Zionist interests by acting as the main perpetrators of anti-Islamic violence and rhetoric which Israel needs if her infernal ‘war on terror’ and ‘clash of civilizations’ is to continue bulldozing forward. They are front and center in canonizing Hitler and the 3rd Reich–both of these totally useless and counterproductive strategies in terms of waking up an anesthetized general public as to the very real dangers which the world faces as a result of Judaic intrigue, and, as we saw last summer with the idiotic spectacle taking place in Charlottesville Va, the manner by which this particular breed of ‘activists’ engages in utterly inane behavior that becomes international news.

And in each and every case where something goes BOOM and after the smoke clears we find some idiot (or a group of them) from the alt-right/WN camp sitting right in the middle of all of it–ABRACADABRA, ALAKAZAM–the iron grip which Judea, Inc maintains over the mind of John Q. Public is further solidified and tightened.

In the meantime, those who try to maintain a sane, rational and intelligent dialogue on these very serious problems we all face are declared guilty by virtue of being associated with knuckledraggers that include such luminaries as Andrew Anglin & co who receive FRONT PAGE coverage in the JMSM on a regular basis, to say nothing of the manner by which all of this festering stink is used in putting enormous political pressure on Trump, as referenced in this very piece.

As we say here often, no one ever accused the Jews of being stupid, and whether it is idiot members within the Islamic community who are recruited for groups such as ISIS in order to give Islam a black eye or whether it is the alt-right/WN (or the various groups which intersect with them such as the ‘Hoaxers’) in the end they wind up enlisting themselves in the services of the very enemy against which they claim to be fighting and in the process make even more difficult and dangerous that endeavor of saving ourselves from the eternal menace that threatens to destroy us all.

The Daily Beast

The new documentary Alt-Right: Age of Rage, which premiered at SXSW, opens on an unsettling scene: 20,000 American Nazis holding a rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden.

Held by the German-American Bund, an organization of American-born Nazi sympathizers, the event occurred on Feb. 20, 1939, where these tailored traitors denounced Jews, President Roosevelt, and the “Jewish-controlled” media. It managed to attract widespread media attention not for its ugly messaging but violent clashes in the streets, as well as an incident of stormtrooper cosplayers severely beating and stripping a Jewish protester onstage.

“We, with American ideals, demand that our government shall be returned to the American people who founded it,” proclaimed Fritz Kuhn, leader of the Bund.

If that sort of rhetoric sounds awfully familiar, it should, as it echoed that of the white nationalist America First Committee (AFC), whose motto has been co-opted by President Donald Trump.

Age of Rage draws parallels between the Nazis’ night at the Garden and the alt-right march on Charlottesville, that saw Ku Klux Klansmen, neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, and white power militias banding together to unify in the name of hate. The white nationalist rally was organized by Jason Kessler, former contributor to the far-right publication The Daily Caller, and onetime KKK Grand Wizard David Duke and white supremacist Richard Spencer gave speeches. It eventually ended in tragedy when a white nationalist drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing anti-racist activist Heather Heyer.

In the wake of the tragedy, the camera trains on Spencer, who characterizes the rally as a “win” for the alt-right, saying, “It does feel like a win, because we demonstrated our resolve.”

Spencer is one of the main characters of director Adam Bhala Lough’s documentary; his counterpoint is Daryle Lamont Jenkins, an antifa activist who runs the One People’s Project, an organization that specializes in unmasking racists.

“He’s dedicated his life to hating people, basically,” Spencer says of Jenkins, well-aware of the irony. It’s a truly comical sentiment coming from a man who’s called for “black genocide” and repeatedly campaigns for the creation of a “white ethnostate,” or “a safe haven for whites around the world”—in other words, a literal safe space.

An academic who once claimed to have been mentored by Trump senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, Spencer garnered national headlines for a Washington, D.C., event celebrating the presidential election of Donald Trump, wherein he quoted Nazi literature, cried out “Hail Trump!,” and was met with Nazi salutes and sieg heil chants from the crowd. The film ever so briefly explores Spencer’s history as a rotund student of Shakespeare and Nietzsche (because of course) who once voted for John Kerry, but fails to examine how and when he was radicalized.

Like many white nationalists, Spencer felt emboldened by the election of Donald Trump, calling it a “victory of will” (a nod to Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will). As white nationalist Jared Taylor, the “godfather of the alt-right”—and a man with some pretty jacked-up teeth—explains, “Donald Trump did appeal to a certain incipient racial consciousness among the electorate. He wanted to build a wall, he wanted to throw out all illegals, and he wanted to take a very, very hard look at Muslim immigration. Those people are incipiently racially conscious, because all of those policies, they will slow the dispossession of whites; they will slow the reduction of whites to a minority. This is an important appeal to a certain number of Americans. I don’t know how many.” [“jacked up teeth ??”]

In its commitment to objectivity, presenting Spencer and Jenkins as two sides of a coin, Lough’s film falls victim to false balance. Spencer’s views remain relatively unchallenged throughout the film, so one wonders whether he should have been granted this platform to begin with. Thank goodness for Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, who offers the most insightful commentary in the film, calling the alt-right “a rebranding of white supremacy for public-relations purposes,” arguing that the notion of there being “equivalency” between the radical right and the radical left in the U.S. is “ridiculous,” and illustrating how “for these four years, white nationalists really feel like they have their man in the White House” in Trump.

Potok also addresses the debate between “quarantine” and “inoculation,” or the idea that the vile hatemongers among us should either be ignored or examined. He concludes that today, with our various modes of communication, quarantine is “totally impossible as a practical manner.”[sic] I’m not quite as convinced that’s the case, and as Lough’s film begins focusing more on Spencer than Jenkins, you can see why.

White nationalists like Spencer, Taylor, and others were given a considerable shot in the arm when, following their march on Charlottesville, President Trump took it upon himself to condemn the counterprotesters and maintained that there was “blame on both sides”—not once, but twice. And Lough’s film includes some impressive—and very disturbing—behind-the-scenes footage of the march on Charlottesville, including clandestine chats between Duke and Spencer (complaining about Jews, naturally) and shots of Spencer crying like a little boy with a skinned knee as he’s chauffeured out of the fracas.

When asked about the string of terrorist attacks carried out by white nationalists, an ever-growing list that now includes Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz, Spencer confesses that the “alt-right” movement tends to attract the mentally infirm.

“I think it means something in the sense that the alt-right is getting at that fissure, you know? It’s getting at the really taboo issues, it’s getting at the most difficult aspects of society, and so that might attract people who are ill in some way,” Spencer says.

Lough’s film, however, ends on a message of hope—courtesy of the underutilized Jenkins, who keeps on fighting for justice in the face of pancreatic cancer.

“We’re not divided the way people may think we are,” he says. “We’re frustrated, we want questions answered, but we’re not divided.”


https://www.cbsnews.com/news/comey-memos-release-congress-trump-2018-04-19/
President Trump approved the transmission of former FBI Director James Comey's memos to Congress, two sources familiar with the matter tell CBS News' chief White House correspondent Major Garrett. The president approved the transmission after reviewing the recommendations from top Justice Department officials, Garrett reports.

Those familiar with the memos say they are longer, and more detailed, than Comey has described publicly and are therefore — from the White House perspective — more "favorable" than Comey's description in his book or in recent interviews. The memos were requested by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Virginia, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., and House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif.

Trump calls "leaks" of Comey memos "cowardly"

Rod Rosenstein knew Trump would fire Comey before memo, senators say

Comey, who was fired by Mr. Trump in May, has begun a tour to tout his new book, "A Higher Loyalty," which describes his time as FBI director and the time period surrounding his firing. In the book, Comey describes Mr. Trump as "untethered to truth," and Mr. Trump's leadership style as "ego driven and about personal loyalty."

In response, Mr. Trump has fired off a handful of tweets about Comey, calling him a "weak and untruthful slime ball."

"It was my great honor to fire James Comey," Mr. Trump tweeted over the weekend.


Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
James Comey is a proven LEAKER & LIAR. Virtually everyone in Washington thought he should be fired for the terrible job he did-until he was, in fact, fired. He leaked CLASSIFIED information, for which he should be prosecuted. He lied to Congress under OATH. He is a weak and.....

8:01 AM - Apr 13, 2018
127K

Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
....untruthful slime ball who was, as time has proven, a terrible Director of the FBI. His handling of the Crooked Hillary Clinton case, and the events surrounding it, will go down as one of the worst “botch jobs” of history. It was my great honor to fire James Comey!

8:17 AM - Apr 13, 2018
143K
Comey's memos, some of which he leaked to a friend for release to the media, influenced Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein's decision to appoint special counsel Robert Mueller to oversee the Russia investigation into Russian election meddling and any ties to Trump associates.

© 2018 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.


MSNBC MADDOW

The Rachel Maddow Show / The MaddowBlog
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THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 4/17/18
TRUMP ACCIDENTALLY DID THE RIGHT THING!!
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The Rachel Maddow Show / The MaddowBlog
Wednesday’s Mini-Report, 4.18.18
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