AUGUST 20 AND 21, 2018


NEWS AND VIEWS


IT’S THE SAME OLD FAKE NEWS ARGUMENT AGAIN. HOW TIRESOME.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rudy-giuliani-truth-isnt-truth-trump-russia/
CBS NEWS August 19, 2018, 10:55 AM
Rudy Giuliani on Russia probe: "Truth isn't truth"

PHOTOGRAPH -- Rudy Giuliani, former New York City mayor and current lawyer for President Trump, seen at the White House on May 30, 2018. GETTY

President Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani acknowledged Sunday that the 2016 Trump Tower meeting between top Trump campaign staff and a Russian lawyer "was originally for the purpose of getting information about [Hillary] Clinton." In an interview on NBC's "Meet the Press" with Chuck Todd, Giuliani also expressed concern about the possibility the special counsel's investigation could set a perjury trap for the president based on a different "version of the truth."

With regards to the Trump Tower meeting, Giuliani repeated the most recent explanation offered by Mr. Trump, whose accounts of the meeting have shifted over the past year.

"Well, because the meeting was originally for the purpose of getting information about, about Clinton. The meeting turned into a meeting ..." Giuliani said.

Todd interjected, "Which in itself is attempted collusion."

"No it's not," Giuliani replied.

He continued, "That was the original intention of the meeting. It turned out to be a meeting about another subject and it was not pursued at all. And, of course, any meeting with regards to getting information on your opponent is something any candidate's staff would take. If someone said, I have information about your opponent, you would take that meeting."

When the meeting between Kremlin-connected lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort first came to light, the campaign claimed it was just to discuss Russian adoptions. The president gave a different story earlier this month, stating in a tweet, "This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics -- and it went nowhere. I did not know about it!"

Giuliani also explained why he's has some reservations about President Trump sitting for an interview with Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Earlier this month, he put the odds of such an interview at "50-50."

On "Meet the Press" Sunday, Giuliani said, "Look, I am not going to be rushed into having him testify so that he gets trapped into perjury. And when you tell me that, you know, he should testify because he's going to tell the truth and he shouldn't worry, well that's so silly because it's somebody's version of the truth. Not the truth."

"Truth is truth," Todd said.

"No, it isn't truth. Truth isn't truth," Giuliani said. "The President of the United States says, 'I didn't ...'"

"Truth isn't truth?" Todd replied, adding, "This is going to become a bad meme."

Giuliani continued, "Donald Trump says I didn't talk about Flynn with Comey. Comey says you did talk about it, so tell me what the truth is."

© 2018 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.



WHAT INFORMATION DID MUELLER GET FROM HIM, I WONDER? MAYBE LITTLE OR NONE, BECAUSE HE DID TAKE THE CHOICE OF FACING THE JUDGE ON HIS CHARGES. THERE'S SO MUCH THAT WE’LL PROBABLY NEVER KNOW. WHAT I’D LIKE TO SEE IS FOR A TV SERIES TO BE CREATED ON THIS WHOLE RUSSIA/CORRUPTION SCANDAL. IT COULD BE DONE IN THE STYLE OF 48 HOURS, AND GO INTO DETAIL, MAKING RELATIONSHIPS CLEAR. I WONDER HOW MANY BEST SELLERS WILL BE WRITTEN ABOUT IT ALL?

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/paul-manafort-trial-verdict-eight-counts-today-2018-08-17-live-updates/
By KATHRYN WATSON CBS NEWS August 21, 2018, 5:30 PM
Paul Manafort trial verdict: Guilty on 8 counts -- live updates
Paula Reid, Nicole Sganga and Steven Portnoy contributed to this report

Paul Manafort, President Trump's former campaign chairman, has been found guilty on five counts of tax fraud, one count of failing to disclose his foreign bank accounts and two counts of bank fraud.

The jury was unable to reach consensus on 10 of the 18 counts in the bank fraud trial of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Judge T.S. Ellis III will declare a mistrial on the 10 unresolved counts but is accepting the jury's verdict on the remaining eight counts. Ellis decided there was "manifest necessity" to proceed.

Manafort verdict:
5 counts tax fraud: Guilty
2 counts bank fraud: Guilty
1 count failure to disclose foreign bank account: Guilty
10 counts: Jury unable to reach consensus
When the verdict was read, Manafort stood before the judge without flinching, his hands folded beneath his waist. He appears to have lost weight in recent weeks.

After the trial, Manafort's attorney, Kevin Downing, told reporters that Manafort was disappointed he was not acquitted on all counts, but he thanked Ellis for a fair trial and the jury for its long deliberation. Downing also said that Manafort is evaluating his options.

Manafort faced 18 counts — five counts related to false income tax returns, four counts of failing to file foreign bank account reports, four counts of bank fraud and five counts of bank fraud conspiracy. The government alleges Manafort hid tens of millions of dollars in income and falsified records to enrich himself and live a life of luxury.

The jury — composed of six men and six women — began deliberations Thursday morning, after a little more than two weeks at trial. The government had recommended between eight and 10 years in prison if he's found guilty of the charges against him.

The Manafort trial is the first to stem from special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian election meddling and any ties to Trump associates, although the trial did not involve charges related to work on the campaign — something President Trump and his allies have been careful to note.

The government has made the case that Manafort was a liar who worked in deception, summarizing the case as such in its closing arguments.

"When you follow the trail of Mr. Manafort's money, it is littered with lies," prosecutor Greg Andres told the jury.

The defense, which rested its case without calling any of its own witnesses, largely focused on the character of former Trump campaign aide Rick Gates, who claimed he committed crimes with Manafort. Gates admitted to having an affair a decade ago, and he admitted he also embezzled several hundred thousand dollars from Manafort. The defense seized upon these admissions to question his reliability and ethical standards. Gates secured a plea deal.

Earlier this year, CBS News' Paula Reid reported — based on sources familiar with Manafort's legal strategy — that he was banking on a presidential pardon.

The president has distanced himself from Manafort, claiming he "came into the campaign very late and was with us for a short period of time," but hasn't criticized the former Trump campaign manager publicly and has suggested the situation is unfair.

"Looking back on history, who was treated worse, Alfonse Capone, legendary mob boss, killer and 'Public Enemy Number One,' or Paul Manafort, political operative & Reagan/Dole darling, now serving solitary confinement — although convicted of nothing? Where is the Russian Collusion?" the president tweeted earlier this month.

© 2018 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.


I SUPPOSE COHEN’S REWARD FOR PLEADING GUILTY TO CAMPAIGN FINANCE VIOLATION IS THE FACT THAT I SEE NO OTHER CHARGES MENTIONED HERE. HE DID SPECIFICALLY SAY THAT HE WAS DIRECTED TO “COMMIT A CRIME,” BY THE PRESIDENT, SO I SUPPOSE THIS WAS IT. I WONDER WHAT HIS SENTENCE WILL BE.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/michael-cohen-president-trumps-longtime-personal-attorney-reaches/story?id=57310974
Michael Cohen, Trump’s former longtime personal attorney, pleads guilty to illegal campaign contributions 'at the direction of a candidate for federal office'
By GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS, ELIANA LARRAMENDIA, MATTHEW MOSK, JAMES HILL, MIKE LEVINE AND LAUREN PEARLE Aug 21, 2018, 6:59 PM ET

WATCH SPECIAL REPORT: Trump attorney pleads guilty to campaign finance violations

Michael Cohen, the former longtime fixer and personal attorney for Donald Trump, appeared in federal court in New York Tuesday afternoon, pleaded guilty to eight counts and said that he made illegal campaign contributions "in coordination and at the direction of a candidate for federal office."

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The "candidate" Cohen referred to was not named in court or in the criminal information charging document but one of Cohen's lawyers, Lanny Davis, later said that Cohen had "testified under oath that Donald Trump directed him to commit a crime."

The campaign finance violations are associated with Cohen’s role in alleged hush money agreements with two women, Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, who claim to have had affairs with Trump.

While the criminal information does not name Trump, the document does identify Cohen as the personal attorney "to Individual-1, who at that point had become the President of the United States."

The information states that Cohen made a contribution to "Individual-1" and "did so by making and causing to be made an expenditure, in cooperation, consultation, and concert with, and at the request and suggestion of one or more members of the campaign, to wit, COHEN made a $130,000 payment to Woman-2 to ensure that she not publicize damaging allegation before the 2016 presidential election and thereby influence that election."

“I participated in this conduct for the principal purpose” of influencing an election, Cohen said.

The president's current personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, was quick to react.

"There is no allegation of any wrongdoing against the President in the government's charges against Mr. Cohen. It is clear that, as the prosecutor noted, Mr. Cohen's actions reflect a pattern of lies and dishonesty over a significant period of time,” Giuliani said in a statement.

Davis, Cohen's lawyer, countered: "Michael Cohen took this step today so that his family can move on to the next chapter."

"This is Michael fulfilling his promise made on July 2nd to put his family and country first and tell the truth about Donald Trump," Davis continued, referring to comments Cohen made in an interview with ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos.

(MORE EXCLUSIVE: Michael Cohen says family and country, not President Trump, is his 'first loyalty' )

"Today he stood up and testified under oath that Donald Trump directed him to commit a crime by making payments to two women for the principal purpose of influencing an election. If those payments were a crime for Michael Cohen, then why wouldn't they be a crime for Donald Trump?” Davis said.

Cohen, wearing a dark suit and yellow tie, came in looking relaxed and even appeared to wink at the journalists behind him, but he stiffened as the hearing proceeded.

The federal judge asked him numerous questions about waiving his rights and addressed his competency to do so.

Cohen responded that “in four days I’ll be 52.” He said he hasn’t been treated for psychological problems or addiction but said “last night I had a glass of Glenlivet 12 on the rocks,” referring to the pricey, single malt Scotch whiskey, which he said was not his custom.

Cohen had agreed to a deal with federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York that required him to plead guilty to the violations of campaign finance law as well as several felony charges of bank fraud and tax evasion.

The tax charges stem from Cohen’s personal business dealings and investments in real estate and the taxi industry.

When the federal judge asked Cohen if he understood that he could get a maximum sentence of 65 years in prison if sentenced consecutively, Cohen said “yes.”

The government estimates Cohen would face some significant prison time under the deal, which will also require Cohen to make a substantial monetary forfeiture.

Though Cohen has been for weeks publicly signaling a willingness to consider a cooperation pact with authorities, it is unclear if there is a provision in the deal that requires Cohen to cooperate in ongoing federal investigations, either in New York or in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

There was no immediate indication of a cooperation agreement with the government -- but the absence of a cooperation deal - while it would be notable - would not completely eliminate the possibility that Cohen could subsequently provide information to investigators that might result in a more lenient sentence.

Given Cohen’s proximity to Trump during the past decade, including throughout his meteoric rise from mogul and reality television star to the White House, observers consider him one of most potent legal thorns to confront Trump’s presidency since he took office.

“The guy who knows where all the bodies are buried,” said Seth Hettena, an author and veteran journalist who has chronicled Trump’s business career.

The investigation into Cohen was referred to New York’s Southern District by special counsel Robert Mueller, and if Cohen agrees to cooperate, the information he provides could benefit the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. But it remains unclear if he has committed to cooperate.

Cohen’s relationship with Trump dates to the mid-2000’s after Cohen, who owned condominiums in multiple Trump buildings in New York, took Trump’s side in a legal dispute with the condo board at Trump World Tower on Manhattan’s East Side. Cohen eventually went to work for the Trump Organization, where he held the positions of executive vice president and special counsel to Donald J. Trump.

PHOTO: Michael Cohen, former personal lawyer for President Donald Trump, exits the United States District Court Southern District of New York on May 30, 2018 in New York City.Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images

"Michael Cohen has great insight into the real estate market," Trump said of Cohen in a 2007 New York Post interview. "He has invested in my buildings because he likes to make money – and he does."

In addition to working inside the Trump Organization as a lawyer and problem solver, Cohen built a diverse portfolio of investments.

At one point that included running 260 yellow cabs with a Ukrainian-born partner – a partnership that ended in 2012. He also invested millions in real estate, often turning a tidy profit. For instance, a building he bought in 2011 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan for $2.1 million, sold three years later for $10 million in cash.

The FBI raid on Cohen’s home and office in April gave the most significant indication his business dealings could become a legal problem for him.

For more than a decade around the office in Trump Tower – and around New York – Cohen’s loyalty to Trump was unquestioned as he developed a reputation as Trump's "pit bull."

(MORE:Michael Cohen hints at possible cooperation with investigators)

"It means that if somebody does something Mr. Trump doesn't like, I do everything in my power to resolve it to Mr. Trump's benefit," Cohen said in a 2011 interview with ABC News. "If you do something wrong, I'm going to come at you, grab you by the neck and I'm not going to let you go until I'm finished."

In 2010, Cohen was among the creators of a website, ShouldTrumpRun.org, that sought to encourage the New York real estate tycoon and reality television star to pursue a challenge to President Barrack Obama in the 2012 election.

"I think the world of [Trump]," Cohen told ABC News in the 2011 interview. "I respect him as a businessman, and I respect him as a boss."

Cohen’s dealings at the Trump family business covers a broad sweep of its global empire – including several projects that have caught the attention of federal investigators. Cohen played an integral role in early discussions about a possible Trump Tower in Moscow – negotiations that were going on during the early months of the 2016 presidential campaign.

That deal never reached fruition.

“He could be extremely valuable,” said Matthew G. Olsen, a former federal prosecutor and ABC News contributor. “He was not just a personal lawyer but also was President Trump’s so-called fixer for a number of years. So he would have had access to lots of very personal information involving his business dealings.”

In January - the Wall Street Journal first revealed Cohen’s role in negotiating a secret non-disclosure agreement with adult-film actress Stephanie Clifford, aka Stormy Daniels. The deal – which was executed less than two weeks prior to the November presidential election – paid Daniels $130,000 in exchange for her silence.

Government watchdog groups quickly filed complaints with the Federal Election Commission and the Department of Justice, asking the agencies to investigate for possible violations of campaign finance law.

Following the disclosure of the Daniels’ deal, Cohen insisted that he had acted on his own in the Daniels deal and that he had not been reimbursed by the campaign or the Trump Organization.

He told ABC News that the funds used to pay Daniels came from an existing home equity line of credit.

Two sources familiar with the search warrant that led to the raids on Cohen properties told ABC News in April that federal agents were hunting for records tied to Cohen’s personal business dealings and secret deals with Trump's alleged mistresses, media organizations during the 2016 presidential campaign.

On April 5, four days before the authorities raided Cohen’s properties in New York, President Trump told reporters on Air Force One that he didn’t know why Cohen had paid Daniels or where he had gotten the money to pay her. The president later acknowledged, in a financial disclosure form filed last month with the Office of Government Ethics, that he had reimbursed Cohen.

Then there is Karen McDougal, who in August 2016 signed a $150,000 deal with American Media Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer, that transferred to the company the rights to her story of an alleged ten-month romantic affair with Trump in 2006. The magazine never published her story. McDougal alleged in a lawsuit filed earlier this year that Cohen had allegedly conspired with her former attorney to bury the story. McDougal settled her lawsuit.

President Trump, through his representatives, has denied the allegations of McDougal and Daniels.



I HAVE JUST SPENT HALF AN HOUR TRYING TO FIND A DEFINITION FOR “BALLOT LINE” IN THE TERM “TAKING THE BALLOT LINE.” WHERE I FOUND IT MENTIONED IS IN WIKIPEDIA UNDER “FUSION VOTING.” MAYBE I’LL JUST CALL THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY HEADQUARTERS AND ASK THEM. MAYBE IT’S A WAY TO BYPASS THE BUDDY SYSTEM THAT WE HAVE IN THE PARTY RIGHT NOW, IN WHICH NO OUTSIDERS WILL BE ABLE TO “WIN.” IT HAS OCCURRED TO ME SEVERAL TIMES SINCE I FIRST HEARD ABOUT BERNIE’S PRACTICE ON RUNNING AS A DEMOCRAT AND THEN DROPPING OUT TO BE RELISTED AS AN INDEPENDENT WHEN HE WINS. WHAT IS THE REASON FOR IT? IT SEEMS UNNECESSARY. COULD IT BE A MATTER OF WHO IS ALLOWED ON THE BALLOT “LINE” FOR THE DEMOCRATS? THE REASON COULD BE THAT CERTAIN KINDS OF PEOPLE MIGHT BE BLACKBALLED, SUCH AS JEWS. COULD THAT BE IT? AH, WELL, IT’S ANOTHER NIGHT AND TIME TO GO TO SLEEP.

https://www.sevendaysvt.com/OffMessage/archives/2018/08/21/bernie-sanders-declines-democratic-senatorial-nomination
NEWS / U.S. POLITICS
Bernie Sanders Declines Democratic Senatorial Nomination
POSTED BY PAUL HEINTZ ON TUE, AUG 21, 2018 AT 5:50 PM
Updated at 7:07 p.m.

PHOTOGRAPH -- FILE: ERIC TADSEN Sen. Bernie Sanders

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has officially turned down the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate, according to the Vermont Secretary of State's Office.

Sanders, who took home nearly 91 percent of the vote in last week's Democratic primary, informed the state last Friday that he would decline the nomination, according to elections director Will Senning. Neither the candidate nor the Secretary of State's Office announced the move at the time, though it hardly comes as a surprise.

A longtime independent, Sanders has sought the Democratic nomination since he first ran for the Senate in 2006, in order to prevent another candidate from taking the ballot line*. Each time he has declined the nomination upon winning it. His staff made clear from the start of this year's campaign that this time would be no different.

"Senator Sanders is very proud that almost 91% of Vermont Democrats cast their ballots for him last Tuesday," campaign manager Shannon Jackson said in a statement Tuesday. "They know he is fighting every day for them and their families."

Jackson said his boss would “continue to vigorously support Democratic candidates up and down the ballot in Vermont and across the country who are standing up against the disastrous Trump administration and fighting for economic, racial, social and environmental justice."

The Vermont Democratic Party appeared ready for the candidate's decision. In a statement issued last Thursday, the day before Sanders turned down the nomination, VDP spokesperson R. Christopher Di Mezzo called the senator "a powerful voice for Democratic values, issues and candidates." He said the party expected Sanders to decline the nomination but would nevertheless "fully and enthusiastically endorse" him at its September state committee meeting.

"With or without the Democratic label next to his name on the ballot, Bernie Sanders is our candidate for U.S. Senate," Di Mezzo said.

Other Democrats have been less forgiving. When Sanders sought the party's presidential nomination in 2016, detractors criticized his longstanding unwillingness to run with a "D" after his name.

“He isn't a Democrat — that's not a smear, that's what he says,” wrote Sanders’ rival for the nomination, Hillary Clinton, in her post-campaign book, “What Happened,” adding, "I am proud to be a Democrat and I wish Bernie were too.”

Sanders' supporters have noted that he caucuses with Senate Democrats, votes for its majority leader candidates and even serves in its leadership structure.

H. Brooke Paige, a perennial candidate for statewide office, narrowly secured the Republican nomination to challenge Sanders, with 26.5 percent of his party’s vote. But Paige, who won five other nominations last week, has said he may decline one or more of them.

Taylor Dobbs contributed reporting.



THIS SANDERS ARTICLE IS A FEW MONTHS OLD, BUT INTERESTING. TRUMP ISN’T THE ONLY ONE WITH HIS OWN TV PRODUCTION NOW. I SUPPOSE IT IS TRUE THAT GIVING YOUR STORY TO A LARGE ENTERPRISE LIKE THE NEW YORK TIMES IS SLIGHTLY RISKY, AS THEY WILL HAVE THEIR OWN SLANT OR JUST PUT IT IN A LOWER POSITION OF PRIORITY. SEE THIS ARTICLE BELOW.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/04/bernie-sanders-is-quietly-building-a-digital-media-empire.htm
APR. 22, 2018
Bernie Sanders Is Quietly Building a Digital Media Empire
By Gabriel Debenedetti

PHOTOGRAPH -- Welcome to Bernie TV.

For a brief moment in late October 2016, when Hillary Clinton was surfing on a six-point national lead over Donald Trump and James Comey had yet to dive-bomb the presidential race, the talk of the political class was a set of curious reports suggesting that after losing embarrassingly, Trump could soon pursue his own TV network. The chatter grew loud enough that, just two weeks before Election Day, the candidate had to start publicly fending off rumors about his aspirations of a media venture, for fear that his supporters would lose interest in him just as early voting was getting underway.

“No, I have no interest in Trump TV — I hear it all over the place, I hear it,” he announced to one Cincinnati radio host, clearly reveling in the speculation but straining to get the attention back to the election at hand. “I have a tremendous fan base, I mean, we have a tremendous base, we have the most incredible people. But I just don’t have any interest in that.”

Denials aside, it made some kind of sense. Here was a screw-the-system, longtime student and manipulator of the press who’d just upended one massive institution (a political party) turning his attention to another that he’d spent years rhetorically ripping to shreds (the mass media), just as everyone finally — after all these decades — knew, and would never forget, his name.

The calculation still works. But Donald Trump isn’t the 2016 candidate who’s got a mini-media empire with a dedicated following all figured out. It’s Bernie Sanders.

The Vermont senator, who’s been comparing corporate television programming to drugs and accusing it of creating a “nation of morons” since at least 1979 — and musing to friends about creating an alternative news outlet for at least as long — has spent the last year and a half building something close to a small network out of his office in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill.

He understands, but resents, the comparison to the man who’s described the news media as the “enemy of the people.” His take is different, and he has his own plans. “[Am I concerned] that people might see me and Trump saying the same thing? Yes, I am,” Sanders conceded, leaning back in a leather chair in a conference room in his office on a recent Tuesday, as footage of Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony one building over played on TVs throughout his office. Wearing his standard uniform — long tie, jacket in need of a few swipes with a lint roller — he launched into the critique now familiar to anyone who’s watched one of his rallies. “My point of view is a very, very different one. My point of view is the corporate media, by definition, is owned by large multinational corporations: their bottom line is to make as much money as they can. They are part of the Establishment. There are issues, there are conflicts of interest in terms of fossil fuel advertising — how they have been very, very weak, in terms of climate change.” Needless to say, the content he produces is not sponsored by advertisers.

Sanders hosts an interview show (“The Bernie Sanders Show”) that he started streaming over Facebook Live on a semi-regular basis after his staff got the idea in February of 2017 to film the senator chatting with the activist Rev. Dr. William Barber. After they posted that simple clip and it earned hundreds of thousands of views with no promotion, they experimented with more seriously producing Sanders’s conversation days later with Bill Nye.

The chat with the Science Guy ended up with 4.5 million views. Sensing an opportunity, the next day Sanders’s aides turned down multiple network TV requests and took his response to Trump’s first address to Congress directly to his Facebook page.


Things escalated. Audio recordings of his conversations, repackaged as a podcast, have since occasionally reached near the top of iTunes’ list of popular programs. Sanders’s press staff — three aides, including Armand Aviram, a former producer at NowThis News, and three paid interns — published 550 original short, policy-focused videos on Facebook and Twitter in 2017 alone. And, this year, he has begun experimenting with streaming town-hall-style programs on Facebook. Each of those live events has outdrawn CNN on the night it aired.

“The idea that we can do a town meeting which would get a significantly larger viewing audience than CNN at that time is something I would not have dreamed of in a million years, a few years ago,” Sanders says.

The result is a growing venue for Sanders’s legions of backers, and other curious progressives, to take in tightly curated lefty takes on policy news — one that, increasingly, competes directly with more traditional news outlets for eyeballs. There’s little room for minute-by-minute analysis of White House drama or Robert Mueller’s probe — and no panels full of opining “strategists” — but also little room for dissent. The scale is unmatched by any other politician, inviting obvious questions about whether Sanders plans to pivot it into a massive primary campaign-mobilization machine come 2020. But the mainstream media criticism implicit in the venture also invites obvious comparisons — if equally stark contrasts — to the man crying “Fake news” at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Bernie TV (that’s my shorthand: there’s no one name for the enterprise) is online only, and there are no plans to move it elsewhere, cable or otherwise. There’s no profit scheme — it’s produced using Senate resources — and there’s no plan to expand it beyond social media. But the programming represents by far the most advanced evolutionary stage of Sanders’s longtime goal of finding new ways to get around the traditional media and spread his “political revolution” directly.


Kenneth Pennington, a former Senate staffer who later became the presidential campaign’s digital director, recalled Sanders’s refrain from long before he ramped up the current operation: “‘What we are doing is what the news media should be doing. Our goal is to create the biggest network possible for distributing information about public policy.’”

Sanders’s splashiest offerings are the spare 30-minute interviews with figures like Nye, Al Gore, and Bill de Blasio conducted in a small Senate studio. But the bulk of his programming are the short, tightly produced, and highly shareable videos that cover everything from Trump administration greed and lessons to learn from Canada’s health-care scheme to explainers from his staff (“John Bolton Should Scare Everyone,” says his foreign policy adviser in one recent offering) and real people’s straight-to-camera testimonials about their experiences with health care or tax systems. Only around one-quarter of the videos feature Sanders himself, though each is branded with his name.

It’s been a goal of politicians to get around the press and reach voters directly for as long as the nonpartisan news media and elections have co-existed. Barack Obama’s White House, for one, regularly came under fire for producing slick videos rather than taking questions. Those efforts have intensified as the technology has improved. The Democratic National Committee now has a Facebook Live show and multiple senators have their own podcasts. It’s an attractive model: by more tightly controlling their output, they can avoid challenges from tough questioners altogether. They can also get around the embarrassing slip-ups that sometimes come from being too comfortable with friendly anchors. (Sanders experienced this in 2016 when his 2012 suggestion to a supportive radio host that Obama get a primary challenge resurfaced.) Trump, meanwhile, has mused that running his Twitter account is better than trying to play the press game. “It’s like owning my own newspaper,” he said in 2016. “I have, like, 16, 17 million people. That’s like owning the New York Times.” (He rarely does interviews or press conferences now, and has over 50 million followers.)


Sanders is after something bigger, and he’s getting there, in eye-popping fashion. In its first year, Bernie TV’s viewership soared: His office says his 2017 videos were viewed over 800 million times, led by a clip described as “Here’s what happened when a Republican senator challenged a Canadian doctor on their single-payer health care system,” which has been watched 32 million times.

Two videos from Trump’s inauguration and the next day’s Women’s March each got around 15 million views. Then, when Sanders first televised a town hall on his Medicare for All proposal this January, 1.1 million saw it live, and another 1.6 million tuned in the next morning, a plurality of them men between the ages of 25 and 34, according to his staff. When he hosted a similar event about inequality with Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren and Michael Moore in March, 1.7 million watched live, and 2.5 million saw it the next day.

This has never happened before. But most of it emerged without Sanders’s fellow senators paying attention; he rarely coordinates with his colleagues. That’s caused some grumbling among senior Senate staffers who would be happy to see their bosses join Sanders on air, and among others who are nervous that he’s stealthily building a huge operation ahead of a 2020 run.


Sanders himself is open about the central role his media operation would play if he chose to run again (even his closest aides say he hasn’t yet decided). Already, potential opponents are closely studying his programming.

“I would think that any serious political person would be thinking about this,” he said, opening his eyes wide to look around his office, a bit bewildered. “Why would you not?”

“Ultimately, anybody that chooses to run in 2020 will be seeking to build their own audience and production capabilities,” predicted Brian Fallon, Clinton’s press secretary in 2016. “The communications arms of national campaigns will be more like production studios and less devoted to the ability to spin reporters.”

If you buy Sanders’s formulation of What Went Wrong, those campaigns may not have much of a choice if they want to get their message out somehow. His theory of 2016 holds that the corporate media’s inability to focus on long-term issues is a big part of how Trump won in the first place.

“Because people turn on the television, and they’re working longer hours for lower wages, they don’t have health care, their kids can’t afford to go to college, and they’re watching TV: ‘Hey! What about me? You know, I don’t care that Trump fired somebody else today, what about my life or my kids’ lives?’ So what we do, is we look at media in a different sense, we try to figure out what are the issues that impact ordinary people, and how can we provide information to them?”


“And that,” he says, glancing toward his producers in the next room over, where they work in front of large screens, waiting for Sanders to rush through and ask for updates, “is basically what these guys do.”

Those guys’ work amounts to what Sanders has been tilting at for decades, however improbable. The technology just finally made it a bit more possible.

***

Even before he became a national figure, Sanders made his outsized aspirations explicit to his early Senate staff. Prior to running for president, he would regularly pull aside a small group of aides and muse aloud about creating a news agency that focused solely on policy — telling them that he considered his office to be a competitor to the New York Times.

He considered his media operation so central to his broader mission of educating and galvanizing the public that during 2013’s government shutdown he changed Pennington’s official designation from “non-essential” so that Pennington could return from a mandatory furlough to the work of churning out independent content. By then, Sanders’s team was uploading everything he said in public to YouTube, often with little editing, and it tried circumventing traditional press by posting his materials to Reddit, too. Soon, Pennington was issuing regular formal reports to Sanders and other senior staffers that compared the engagement on Sanders’s Facebook page not only to other congressional offices, but to the Times, as well.

Sanders had been building to that ambition since day one of his political career.

When, in 1984, it came time for him to run for a second term, Burlington’s rookie mayor Sanders gathered his close aides and allies, and told them he’d announce his reelection campaign in a new way: with a small imitation newspaper he’d print himself. He’d made no secret of his disgust with the mainstream press (five years earlier, he’d referred to the advertising industry’s use of “Hitlerian principles” in conjunction with TV in a Vanguard Press column), and he was telling friends he was looking for ways to create his own alternative. He soon went multi-platform: He launched a Sunday radio show (“The Mayor Speaks”) and a cable access television show (Bernie Sanders Speaks With the Community), which he would use to interview locals or experts on a relevant topic, to recite poetry, or to rove around Burlington. The seeds of today’s production are visible: In October 1987 — almost exactly 30 years before his interview with Canadian doctor Danielle Martin racked up over 30 million Facebook views — Sanders conducted another long interview with a doctor about the Canadian health-care system. Then, when he got to Washington as a congressman, he regularly produced another program (Eye on Vermont) with his aide Jeff Weaver — 20 years later his presidential campaign manager — that he recorded and sent back to constituents.

The presidential campaign poured gasoline on these long-flickering flames. Sanders’s behind-the-scenes frustration with the mainstream press and desire to create a parallel way to reach millions of people mounted as the race intensified, turning by 2016 into open anger about the “Bernie blackout” — a perceived lack of coverage of his campaign and its crowds in the national press, even if local reporters took notice when he touched down in their city. (To Clinton’s side, this claim was laughable: He may not have been getting much press, but little of the coverage he was getting at the time was negative.) His team started livestreaming rallies, which racked up more and more views as he challenged Clinton more directly.

The race earned him prime media roles. He’s now a frequent participant in networks’ “town hall” style events and Senate Democrats’ most prominent face on Sunday news shows. But after the campaign, his dissatisfaction with his coverage boiled over: The final chapter of his post-2016 book is called “Corporate Media and the Threat to Our Democracy.” Since then, he’s sparred with reporters who cover political process, or issues including federal investigators’ scrutiny of his wife. He recently called a local reporter a “gossip columnist” for refusing to commit to not ask about it — a favored insult since the 1980s toward writers he doesn’t like.

So within the friendly confines of his own office, Sanders constantly asks aides for updates on his video and tweet viewership numbers to make sure he’s playing a prominent enough role in the national conversation, say current and former staffers. Even while walking me the roughly ten feet across the producers’ workspace to get to his conference room, he stopped to ask a headphone-wearing Aviram for an update on his latest project.

“Most comms staffers work to get their boss in the news. We were working to beat the news media at their own game,” Pennington explains. “Now the office is hyperfocused on that. Even more so than when I worked there. Bernie Sanders isn’t going to pass a lot of legislation under a Trump presidency. But he can be useful by spreading the message online. That’s the logic.”

As with everything Sanders does in the Trump age, the question his allies and enemies are now considering is what it all means if he runs for president again. Sanders would be 79 on Inauguration Day 2021, but he’s held rallies across the country since his last run, and he’s convened his top advisers to discuss what such a campaign would look like.

His newfound ability to reach masses of voters directly doesn’t explicitly play into his electoral considerations, Weaver told me. But it looms large: The political team’s major project since that race has been to maximize Sanders’s ability to drive his movement forward directly, whether it’s through his videos or Our Revolution, the post-campaign political group it started.

“Gene McCarthy walked away, he just went back to writing poetry. Howard Dean may have tried to do something, I dunno. But it was nothing like this,” marveled Bill Press, the liberal radio host who hosted the first planning sessions for Sanders’s 2016 campaign in his Washington townhouse in 2014. To Sanders and his closest allies, it’s obvious that his method of connecting directly with his supporters should soon become the national norm.

That’s still not enough for the senator. He’s still acting incredulous that more people don’t see what’s happening before their eyes.

“I would have thought that the fact that a Senate office put on a 90-minute town meeting that, we didn’t quite get to where MSNBC was — we were a few hundred thousand behind them, we were behind Fox — but a pretty solid performance, I would’ve thought somebody would say, ‘Mmm, that’s pretty interesting,’” Sanders told me, standing and spreading his arms wide at the head of his long conference room table, as if he were back behind a campaign lectern. “What are the implications of that?’”

Sanders stopped, and briefly smiled, evidently pleased to be tying a neat bow on the topic, complete with one last elbow. The very fact that his latest town hall had such a huge audience hadn’t gotten enough attention, he griped.

“Shock of all shocks, the corporate media wasn’t all that interested in the issue.”