← Bulwark Takes
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Hey everybody, Tim O from the Bulwark here. The official White House account is now threatening me on social media for my commentary about the Iran war. Frankly, the only surprise is that this hasn't happened earlier. These guys are so thin skinned, their threats are so haphazard. They're using the DOJ to come after all foes that of course eventually they would end up feeling like they had to clap back at the bulwark and send some threats our way. In this case, the White House has decided to suggest I should be investigated over the Foreign Agents Registration Act Fara for sharing some reporting on the Iran war that came from sources on the Iran side. Not my sources by the way. It was a different organization, sources. I find it absolutely hilarious that a White House and a Trump family that is literally on the take from several foreign governments is going to accuse others and threaten others and say that they should be investigated for their relationships to foreign countries, that they might be a foreign agent. The President is a foreign agent. The President's family is a foreign agent. He got a free plane from Qatar. His crypto business got a bailout, a massive multi billion dollar bailout from the uae. His, his son in law is on the take from Saudi Arabia while he's negotiating this Iran deal. They are building golf courses in several countries around the world. They're involved in rare earth mineral projects in Kazakhstan and elsewhere. They're looking to rare earth mineral projects in Greenland. I mean like no one has ever been a foreign agent of more countries than the Trump family. Okay, so the foreign agents are inside the house. If J.D. vance wants to investigate fraud and wants to investigate Farah, he should look into the President's children and maybe start there. So anyway, this is not really much to worry about. It's a ridiculous accusation. I have no relationship with Iran. The tweet that I sent again was based on someone else's reporting. Let's just, let's just run through it so you can just see the ludicrousness of this together. So we have a Twitter feed here which is the Kobayasi letter which is summarizing a separate report they write breaking Iranian state media announces initial deals of the MOU for the US Iran peace deal. They go through some of the details of the deal par Iran. Since this tweet has been posted, Trump's favorite reporter Barak Ravidat Axios has offered the White House's view of what is in this memorandum of understanding. So they're competing descriptions. What is out there? Here was my post. That was the offending post. According to the White House, Trump's initial demand was unconditional surrender. That's a fact. The White House's initial demand here was unconditional surrender. Now the current MoU is to open the strait that had been previously opened but under Iran control and withdraw our military from the region. And then maybe after two months we can continue nuclear negotiations that had already been happening before. Yikes. That was my take. The White House's interpretation of what is happening in these negotiations is that they wouldn't withdraw our military. But everything else in this tweet is the same. Basically from what the Axios report says. Here is the White House's response to me Tim Miller has such a severe case of Trump derangement syndrome that has warped his peanut sized brain that he's starting to take Iranian state media as fact and peddle disinformation on their behalf. Maybe Tim Miller should register under Farah for being an agent of a foreign country. No, that's not what happened. I'm analyzing what's in the public sphere when it comes to descriptions of this mou. We don't really know what the truth is because Trump has lied about it constantly. Obviously the Iranians aren't that trustworthy, but the contours of this deal are pretty similar. It's just very different people quibbling on different sides. And Farah, which the government would know is about like actually being paid to advance information or to advance an agenda really on behalf of a foreign government. We are paid by you guys. Our viewers and members sign up@blogplus.com that's why we need independent media. This is why we need you in case we end up needing lawyers, you know, because we can say what we want and we aren't controlled by the corporations, unlike the Trump administration. We are controlled by the UAE and Qatar and other countries that are paying off his family. We just get to say what we think and that is very freeing. Obviously this is such a ridiculous accusation. The good folks over at Reason Libertarian magazine though, took this seriously and just looked at the accusation and analyzed you know, what it means and how the subtext of it might be a little bit concerning. Here is some from the Reason report on its phase, Miller's criticism falls far outside of Farah. All he did was comment on a public report. But it wouldn't be the first time the federal government tried to weaponize Farah against domestic critics. Passed in 1938 to root out Nazi agent, the law requires anyone conducting political activities at the order request or under direction or control of a foreign power to register publicly or face jail time or fines. In 1951, the DOJ tried to prosecute civil rights activist W.E.B. dubois under Farah, author of the Souls of Black Folk, great book. He was republishing an international communist led petition against nuclear weapons. A judge threw out the case after prosecutors failed to present evidence of any concrete Soviet ties. Since that, the government has mostly used Farah to prosecute foreign spies. The threat against Miller seems to confirm critics for his fears about Farah. And it's also the latest attempt by the Trump administration to browbeat journalists out of reporting on the Iran war. This brings me back to the Obama administration. Obama critiqued Fox News and critiqued the quality of whether it was real news or not. And the right wing media went crazy. I mean, they were flopping all over the place talking about how it was totally unbecoming of the president to insult right wing news outlets. And I was an attack on the First Amendment and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he never came close to anything like this. Imagine if the Obama administration threatened to investigate Fox News for their opinion journalism, saying that they were afoul of some random statute. I mean, that would have been a direct attack on the First Amendment. People would have been right to be upset. They came nothing close to that. It's interesting that the libertarians at Reason are the only ones coming to our defense here at the Bulwark over this. It's not surprising, of course, but it's interesting. You know, it's the kind of thing that 98% you want to laugh off because like fuck these clowns. But just because it's an absurd accusation doesn't mean they won't actually use the Justice Department to go after you. I mean, case in point, Jim Comey, 8647. The other one of the other big news items since I take the pod that I want to talk about was E. Jean Carroll. We have a report now for the New York Times that the Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll, the 82 year old former magazine writer who accused Donald Trump of sexual assault and won her civil case on that accusation. The investigation centers on whether Ms. Carol committed perjury and civil lawsuits against Mr. Trump. According to the person, Mrs. Carroll won the $5 million judgment. So Trump loses a judgment in civil court and he's going to have now his government go after and target the woman that successfully sued him for his sexual behavior that he, by the way, has bragged about in several settings. I mean, he Literally bragged about grabbing women by the pussy against their will. He. Right. He says that he did it. He confessed to this behavior on tape. So there are dozens of women that have credibly accused him of sexual harassment or assault. That's what we know about Donald Trump. He's using his DOJ to target an 82 year old woman. Is that what we want? Is that what people want from the government? When the Trump administration came in and said they were going to not politicize the Department of Justice, do they want the Department of Justice going after elderly women that are critics of the president? And it is truly despicable, deranged. Think about this. According to a jury of their peers in a civil case, Donald Trump sexually assaulted or is liable for sexual assault of E. Jean Carroll. He gets reelected president anyway, and now he uses the government to go after the person that he victimized. So she's being re victimized now by Donald Trump as the President of the United States. Luckily, I get to interview E. Jean. You should go check that out if you haven't. It's one of the most delightful podcasts I've ever done. She is a spitfire and she is no bullshit and she is not afraid. And so, you know, you're picking on the wrong woman here. That said, as a principle of a matter, it should make any women, any fathers of girls, anybody, anybody with a mother, which means everybody should make anyone that is associated with this White House disgusted that they are enabling state sponsored persecution of a woman whose only crime was speaking out about the fact that Donald Trump assaulted her in a dressing room. I mean, it is like, shameful does not even begin to describe the behavior of this administration, of this DOJ of Todd Blanche, a true piece of shit who has decided that he wants to be Attorney General so bad that he's going to use his powers as Attorney General to just go after these minor crimes. Like, do you feel safer out there knowing that Jim Comey and Eugene Carroll are being harassed by the government? Like, does that feel like justice to you? Does that feel like something that, you know, makes you and your family better off or safer? Like, there are real criminals out there. There are sex criminals, there are violent criminals, there are fraudsters and thieves that could be targeted by this doj. Our tax dollars could be used to get the good prosecutors that work for this government to go after people that are actual bad guys, that are actual threats to the public. And instead, this is what they're using their time and money on. So when you have stuff like this after the doj. Who knows what they're going to do? But here's the other part of it. They're going to keep losing. They're going to keep losing because they're not serious people. The facts are not on their side. The good people in this government have either been run out on a rail or have quit on their own for the most part. And they are incompetent. And they have shown themselves to be just utterly, embarrassingly inept when it comes to their efforts to weaponize the government against other people. They've been successful at, like, rewarding the January 6th insurrectionists, people that beat up cops, the real criminals. They've been successful at, like, letting real criminals criminals off the hook. If you're a criminal friend of this White House, you're in good shape. There's never been a better time to be a criminal friend of the President than there is right now. But if you are an innocent antagonist or opponent of the President and the administration wants to come for you, well, on that score, they're over about 172. So we ain't too concerned about the little probably groiper stooge running the White House rapid response account accusing me of nonsense. This is what they do. They're lashing out. The facts are not on their side. This Iran negotiation is a total debacle. It's humiliating. No matter whose description of what's in this mou, you believe it falls so far short of what the initial promises of this war were. The concessions are so minor in the face of the challenges that they have created for the American people in the way of higher prices, the accomplishments are so little as compared to the cost of this war, both to the American people's pocketbooks, but to our government and our military, the amount of munitions and material that we've lost, the lives that have been lost, the people have been injured, all for mou, that's like, well, maybe the strait can be open again and we're just going to keep on talking about nuclear for 60 more days. Heck of a job, Mr. President. Heck of a job. It is an America last foreign policy. Everyone sees it for what it is. That's why he has his lowest approval rating of all time. And having his little minions lash out on social media and say, oh, you're a foreign agent. Oh, if you criticize us, we're going to look into you. We, you might need to register for Farah. It's like, no, you, no, you guys are the ones that screwed this up. You guys are the ones that are on the take from Gulf states in the Middle east and who knows what other countries. And good luck because we'll see how the midterms go. And then investigations start to get become a two way street. That's what we got today on the investigations front. Support us here at Independent Media. Support us at the Bulwark because it's you guys that are funding and we appreciate all of the board plus members, all the people that watch our videos and listen to our podcasts and read the newsletters, especially JVL's Triad newsletter, all of them morning shots, everybody's newsletter. So thank you guys so much. There's so much other stuff out there. We had a great podcast today with Kara Swisher. We focused on tech stuff but a bunch of other stuff in the news. I'm now in New York for some other business. We'll do have a podcast live from New York on Friday. Look forward to seeing you all then.