Brittany Kaiser is an ex-Cambridge Analytica employee who gave written testimony and answered questions at the UK Parliament this week in which she revealed that the Facebook apps that Cambridge Analytica used to covertly gain access to millions of users' data went far beyond the ones disclosed to date, and that the number of total users implicated is "much greater than 87 million." Read the rest
It's hard to know what to make of the raid on Trump family lawyer/bagman/fixer Michael Cohen's office -- there's been plenty of news tick-tock on the subject and legal experts agree that something momentous is going on, but what, exactly, does it all mean. Read the rest
If that's the case, attorney-client privilege doesn't apply.
According to all that is publicly known, Trump does not use email, personally. Others may read out the contents to him, or print out the messages. But he doesn't email.
Significant: In seeking the search warrants for Michael Cohen court docs say, the Government asserts concern "records could have been deleted" without the search of Michael Cohen's property.
— Shimon Prokupecz (@ShimonPro) April 13, 2018
FYI: they are therefore arguing attorney-client privilege does NOT apply. https://t.co/rO981OrAsw
— Jim Sciutto (@jimsciutto) April 13, 2018
Breaking: Court filing reveals prosecutors obtained “covert” search warrants on multiple email accounts of #MichaelCohen, showing “Cohen is in fact performing little to no legal work, and that zero emails were exchanged with President Trump."
— Jim Sciutto (@jimsciutto) April 13, 2018
Breaking: US Atty in NY argues #MichaelCohenRaid sought evidence of conduct “for which Cohen is under criminal investigation.” Court filing redacts what he is under investigation for. Filing responds to Cohen’s motion to restrain evidence collected.
— Jim Sciutto (@jimsciutto) April 13, 2018
Trump doesn't use email... https://t.co/HDJjWY4DfJ
— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) April 13, 2018
Judge: “how did you get that understanding?”Cohens lawyer: “discussions among the defense team about the case”Judge: “who on the defense team said there were thousands?!?...How do you as an officer of the court have basis to tell me there are thousands of documents?”😬
— Amber Jamieson (@ambiej) April 13, 2018
Just another Friday afternoon: Cohen search was separate from Mueller probe, prosecutors say https://t.co/pzaw3VuGMw via @bpolitics
— Joe Schneider (@joe_in_nyc) April 13, 2018
The government response to Michael Cohen’s motion to block review of the material seized during the search of his office https://t.co/5StphsLBxC
— Julian Sanchez (@normative) April 13, 2018
Read the restThis is a remarkable list in any time, place or dimension.
Non-disclosure agreements were designed to protect trade-secrets, but they've morphed into a system for covering up misdeeds, silencing whistleblowers, and suborning perjury -- often at taxpayer expense. Read the rest
The House Energy and Commerce Committee is scheduled to give Mark Zuckerberg a public drubbing on Wednesday morning, sticking up for America and sticking it to the reckless, feckless CEO of a giant digital monopolist who has distorted our discourse to sell us soap and only grudgingly feigned surprise when he was informed that his machine had also been used in an attempt to win an election by trickery. Read the rest
Scott Pruitt, an asshole, was Donald Trump's pick to head the EPA. Read the rest
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a big-business think-tank that authors "model legislation" at the local, state and national level that benefits corporations at the expense of everyday people; their greatest hits make for scary reading -- you can thank ALEC for ag-gag laws, stand-your-ground laws, private prisons, bans on municipal ISPs, killing Obamacare and jailing pipeline protesters. Read the rest
Etowah, Alabama County Sheriff Todd Entrekin took advantage of a Great-Depression-era rule that lets the sheriff pocket any "excess" from the budget for prisoner meals (provided he makes up any shortfall from his own finances) and used $750,000 that had been allocated to feed prisoners to build himself a luxury beach house. When his gardener tipped off a Birmingham News reporter, the gardener was locked up in the Sheriff's jail on mysterious drug charges. Read the rest
The annual Foilie Awards are out; the Electronic Frontier Foundation hands out these sardonic "awards" to the government entities whose Freedom of Information Act responses were the most heel-dragging, kakfaesque, and pointless. Read the rest
The United States is a bit more corrupt than tight-arsed northern European and richer Commonwealth nations, but isn't particularly corrupt all considered. Trump's slackin'! Movers and shakers: Britain itself cleaned up its act after years of politicans dipping into the public kitty, but Australia's slipping--reportedly a crisis of perception more than actual corruption, but alarming all the same.
Here's the least corrupt/Since 2012, several countries significantly improved their index score, including Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal and the United Kingdom, while several countries declined, including Syria, Yemen and Australia.
1. New Zealand 2. Denmark 3. Finland, Norway, Switzerland 6. Singapore, Sweden 8. Canada, Luxembourg, Netherlands, United Kingdom
16. United States
And the most corrupt.
180. Somalia 179. South Sudan 178. Syria 177. Afghanistan 175. Yemen, Sudan 171. Lybia, North Korea, Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea
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The only thing worse than driving a car with defective brakes is unknowingly driving a car with defective brakes -- and learning about them the hard way. Read the rest
After the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, students at MDI High School in Bar Harbor, Maine were scheduled to have a routine lock-down drill, in which students practice how to behave if their school is the site of a similar mass shooting; these drills teach children to sacrifice themselves by distracting the shooter before they are murdered in order to give other students a few more seconds during which the police might arrive and kill the shooter. Read the rest
Labour leader and PM-in-waiting Jeremy Corbyn has promised that when he is Prime Minister, his government will introduce regulations that ban the finance-driven, asset-stripping hostile takeovers of UK companies, in a bid to make finance the "servants of industry not the masters of us all." Read the rest
Wells Fargo has admitted wrongdoing in defrauding 110,000 mortgage borrowers, and to make good on it, they're sending out letters that look like junk-mail, containing a form that customers have to fill in to confirm that they want their stolen money back; if Wells doesn't get a reply, it will assume that those customers are donating their settlements back to the bank's shareholders. Read the rest
Trump FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's tenure has been marked by a disregard for the rules under which his agency is legally bound to operate: his Net Neutrality killing order was made without satisfying the evidentiary burden required by law, on the basis of laughable lies (including more than a million fake anti-Neutrality comments from bots pretending to be dead people, nonexsitent people and people who support Net Neutrality) that even his own agency knew to be false, then stonewalling law enforcement attempts to identify the botmasters -- no surprise that Pai's Neutracide is going to be tied up in court for years. Read the rest
When Lissa Lucas stood up at a public meeting of the West Virginia legislature and read into the record the gas-industry campaign contributions that lawmakers had received prior to taking a favorable view on allowing gas-drillers to drill in West Virginians' property, she was dragged out of the chamber. Read the rest
