Stormy Daniels.
Lucas Jackson / Reuters
Stormy Daniels has sued President Donald Trump again, saying he defamed her with a tweet.
The lawsuit was filed on Monday in federal court in Manhattan — three days after a federal judge in California put her lawsuit there on hold.
Trump's longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, also is named as a defendant in the California case, but Cohen is under criminal investigation and successfully asked for the California court to put that case on hold while the criminal investigation proceeds.
The California case focuses on whether a 2016 settlement agreement — which bars Daniels, an adult film star whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, from speaking about her alleged relationship with Trump from more than a decade ago — was ever validly formed.
Monday's case is focused instead on a Trump tweet regarding a sketch that Daniels released that purports to be a man she says threatened her in a parking lot in Las Vegas in 2011.
Trump retweeted a picture of the sketch, tweeting that it was a picture of a "nonexistent man." He then wrote, "A total con job ...."
"Mr. Trump's defamatory statement was false because Ms. Clifford was in fact
threatened in 2011 as she has recounted and the sketch was the result of her recollection regarding
the appearance of the assailant," her lawyers, Catherine Keenan and Michael Avenatti, wrote in the complaint filed Monday.
She claims in the lawsuit that her damages are more than $75,000.
This is a developing story. Please check back at BuzzFeed News for the latest.
Stormy Daniels
Mike Segar / Reuters
A federal judge on Friday put Stormy Daniels' lawsuit against President Donald Trump and his longtime personal lawyer on hold for 90 days due to the ongoing criminal investigation into that lawyer, Michael Cohen.
"While it is undeniable that Plaintiff has a valid interest in the prompt resolution of her claims, where Mr. Cohen's Fifth Amendment rights are heavily implicated and the potential impact on the criminal investigation substantial, Plaintiff's interests do not outweigh the necessity of a stay," US District Judge James Otero wrote in an order granting a stay of the case.
Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, is an adult film star who has claimed to have had a relationship with Trump more than a decade ago. Trump has denied Daniels' claims about the relationship.
In 2016, however, she signed a settlement agreement requiring her not to talk about the relationship. As part of the agreement, she received $130,000 — a payment facilitated by Cohen. Daniels' lawsuit is an effort to have that settlement agreement tossed out — in part because Trump did not sign it.
Colin Young-wolff / AP
Joy Reid has backed out of a planned speaking event, according to people involved in the conference, as the MSNBC host claims that recently uncovered, anti-gay blog posts were fabricated.
Reid was set to participate Thursday in a "Change Summit" event in New York organized by former US attorney Preet Bharara and his media venture CAFE. Reid planned to moderate a panel with Washington Lt. Gov. Cyrus Habib; Pete Buttigieg, the openly gay mayor of South Bend, Indiana; and Ravi Bhalla, the mayor of Hoboken, New Jersey.
MSNBC and Reid did not immediately return requests for comment late Wednesday night.
Reid's cancelation comes as the MSNBC host, a star progressive voice who hosts a weekend show on the cable news network, scrambles to explain a series of decade-old blog posts that she claims she did not post.
On Monday, Reid told Mediaite that the comments were placed by an “external party” that “manipulated material from my now-defunct blog.” The posts, from 2005–2007, included comments calling Anderson Cooper "the gayest thing on TV" and said that "most straight people cringe at the sight of two men kissing." Cooper came out in 2012.
The author of the posts wrote that "most straight people had a hard time being convinced to watch ‘Brokeback Mountain.' (I admit that I couldn’t go see the movie either, despite my sister’s ringing endorsement, because I didn’t want to watch the two male characters having sex.)"
The new posts follow a separate but similar incident in December, where Reid apologized for making a series of anti-gay remarks on the now-shuttered blog, The Reid Report, including a post that nicknamed Florida Rep. Charlie Crist "Miss Charlie" and claimed that he was a closeted gay man.
In the immediate fallout of the newly surfaced posts, Reid pointed to analysis conducted by a private cybersecurity professional to back up her claims. The Internet Archive, whose digital archive the Wayback Machine was used by a Twitter user who originally uncovered the old posts, said in a statement that it "found nothing to indicate tampering or hacking."
On Wednesday, Reid's lawyer John H. Reichman issued a statement saying, “We have received confirmation the FBI has opened an investigation into potential criminal activities surrounding several online accounts, including personal email and blog accounts, belonging to Joy-Ann Reid. Our own investigation and monitoring of the situation will continue in parallel, and we are cooperating with law enforcement as their investigation proceeds."
LINK: An Internet Nonprofit Challenged Joy Reid’s Claim That Her Blog Was Hacked
Aaron P. Bernstein / Reuters
A prominent liberal donor is trying to connect the kinds of donors who write big checks with data about what races are most promising for Democrats.
The “Take Back Congress Hub,” a subscription-based online tool to identify House races most likely to flip in 2018, was commissioned and funded by Susan Sandler and Steve Phillips, the power couple Democratic donors and activists. Phillips is expected to announce the project Wednesday at a talk in Washington, D.C. with Sen. Cory Booker.
Phillips told BuzzFeed News that amid new liberal energy and what is already a dramatic increase in Democratic fundraising, a need arose for donors to gain clarity about how to maximize the resources in the effort to take back the House from the Republican Party, free from emotion. Many donors are new to politics and risk being swayed by a powerful or compelling narrative, without relying enough on empirical data to make decisions, he said.
The project is the latest in a variety of projects and programs focused on capturing enthusiasm and flipping the House, from the traditional party establishment group like the DCCC (which has a “red-to-blue” program) to newer grassroots-oriented groups like Swing Left, which has used helped send general election money to a series of targeted swing districts.
Why is this one different? People working on the tool argue that, first, the methodology is "more elaborate"; second, the tool emphasizes existing activist groups in the district; and, lastly, this has a different audience: major donors rather than people looking to contribute, for instance, $25.
Using an algorithm integrating 22 statistical variables (e.g. demographics, individual vote history, date of voter registration, partisan index scores, and how individual voters changed their vote from 2012 to 2016). So far the project has highlighted 38 races in 15 states. In one example seen by BuzzFeed News, the algorithm identified Florida-26 as one of the most flippable in the country. It notes while Rep. Carlos Curbelo is the incumbent several factors point to his vulnerability in November: Curbelo is Cuban, but Cuban voters have been trending less Republican the last four cycles, and he’s been one of the most endangered members for years. All of the major prediction think tanks are rating the race as a toss up. The voting model predicted that the Democrat will beat Curbelo, and that unlikely voters will increase the vote total.
The tool also gives donors the ability to contribute directly to grassroots organizations working to turn out voters in advance of the primary.
Phillips spoke of donors scrambling to figure out what they can do and on what areas they should focus their attention leading up to the midterms — and not having a lot of guidance in that vein. “There’s a lot of unclarity on that question,” said Phillips, who has fashioned a profile as an under-the-radar herald of the progressive movement. “It’s really addressing that question that a lot donors had about where to focus and trying to put some empirical data behind that answer.”
This is also part of Phillips’ larger mission to expand fairness in the party and push higher powers to invest more in turning out base voters. Phillips said his thoughts on data go back to dramatic shifts in the party going back to Jesse Jackson’s emergence in Democratic politics, and how demographic changes more than doubled his vote total from 1984 to 1988. The Obama phenomenon was simply an extension of that dynamic so few people seem to understand, Phillips said.
The project is another collaboration with Julie Martinez Ortega, who in 2014 conducted through PowerPAC+ the first-ever audit of the Democratic Party’s consultant spending. The results were embarrassing: The study found that of the $500 million the party spent on the 2008 and 2012 elections, just 2% went to minority-owned firms.
“The real thrust of it is to try to move away from the sentiment of the donors and to have a very sober analysis so that people can have objective measures on which to make their decisions,” Martinez Ortega told BuzzFeed News.
But it also reflects an effort for more efficiency among the donor class. “The most frustrating part is that people have not been empirically-based,” despite advances in technology, said Phillips. “Most Democratic politics is still not driven by numbers or data. That’s what we’re really trying to bring to this.”
Colin Young-wolff / AP
A nonprofit internet library challenged Tuesday MSNBC host Joy Reid’s claim that someone added homophobic material to an archived version of her now-defunct blog.
In a statement, the Internet Archive, which maintains a digital archive of websites called the Wayback Machine said that it had investigated the liberal commentator’s assertion in December 2017, following a request from her attorneys.
“When we reviewed the archives, we found nothing to indicate tampering or hacking of the Wayback Machine versions,” read the statement attributed to Internet Archive officer manager Chris Butler. “At least some of the examples of allegedly fraudulent posts provided to us had been archived at different dates and by different entities.”
Reid first publicly claimed that an “external actor” had “gained access to and manipulated” her old blog, called the The Reid Report, in a statement to Mediaite Monday. According to the Internet Archive, Reid’s lawyers were unclear whether they believed the alteration had happened prior to the original site being taken down from the internet or within the Wayback Machine itself.
The newly-surfaced posts, from 2005–2007, make reference to Anderson Cooper – who came out in 2012 — as “the gayest thing on TV,” state that “most straight people cringe at the sight of two men kissing,” and recount that the author was unable to attend Brokeback Mountain, a love story about two cowboys, because she “didn’t want to watch the two male characters having sex.”
In December, Reid apologized for a separate series of remarks on The Reid Report that were criticized as homophobic.
The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web that researchers and journalists rely on for its snapshots of defunct websites and previous iterations of extant ones. Website owners can opt out of their content being captured by the Wayback Machine through what’s called the robots exclusion standard, or “robots.txt”
According to the statement by the Internet Archive, “A robots.txt exclusion request specific to the Wayback Machine was placed on the live blog” of the Reid Report after its correspondence with Reid’s lawyer. “That request was automatically recognized and processed by the Wayback Machine and the blog archives were excluded, unbeknownst to us (the process is fully automated).”
Neither Reid nor MSNBC immediately returned requests for comment.
Joshua Roberts / Reuters
In battleground states in the middle of the country, some Democrats watched with frustration as their party grabbed headlines last week with a splashy new lawsuit alleging a vast conspiracy between President Donald Trump and Russia.
The Democratic National Committee’s drumbeat of messaging on Trump and his relationship with Russia is wearing thin with some Democrats in purple states — particularly in the Midwest, where people on the ground say voters are uninterested and even turned off by the issue. The suit exposes a gap, they say, between the party’s strategy nationally and what Midwest Democrats believe will win elections in their state.
“The DNC is doing a good job of winning New York and California,” said David Betras, the Democratic county party chair in Mahoning County, Ohio, home to Youngstown. “I’m not saying it’s not important — of course it’s important — but do they honestly think that people that we just laid off another shift at the car plant in my home county give a shit about Russia when they don’t have a frickin’ job?”
Trump and Russia, Betras said, is the “only piece they’ve been doing since 2016. [Trump] keeps talking about jobs and the economy, and we talk about Russia.”
For some people working to elect Democrats in Midwestern swing states, the suit — which threads evidence of a conspiracy between Trump’s campaign, WikiLeaks, Russia, and Trump family members — prompted something akin to an eyeroll.
“I’m going to be honest, I don’t understand why they’re doing it,” said one campaign strategist in the Midwest of the DNC’s suit. “My sense was it was a move meant to gin up the donor base, not our voters. But it was the biggest news they’ve made in a while.”
Though he doesn’t see it hurting his campaign now, the strategist said, “I wouldn’t want to see something like this coming out of the DNC in October."
The suit is “politically unhelpful," another strategist in the Midwest said. "I haven’t seen a single piece of data that says voters want Democrats to re-litigate 2016 ... The only ones who want to do this are Democratic activists who are already voting Democratic.”
Senator Claire McCaskill, fighting a tough reelection battle in Missouri, which Trump won by almost 20 points, called the DNC’s Russia suit a “silly distraction” through a spokeswoman.
In places Minnesota, for instance, where Trump lost only narrowly and his approval numbers have stayed flat, the state party says it plans to steer clear of him altogether with two Senate seats and an open governor’s race on the ballot. Messaging on Trump doesn’t do anything to move the needle, strategists there say.
And the Democratic Party’s attacks on Trump, especially when it comes to Russia, could even backfire in states Trump won handily — like Ohio, where the focus on taking the president down has kept some voters on the president’s side.
“Somehow we’ve made him into a blue-collar underdog billionaire,” said Betras, of Youngstown. “And people are rooting for him because he’s the underdog.”
Still, “I don’t think it hurts,” said David Pepper, the chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party. “If you have credible claims, you have a responsibility to pursue legal action. I think you have a day or two where [the suit] is the story, but that’s different from your overall message.”
In his state, at least, that message should stay far away from Russia, Pepper said — something he thinks the DNC understands.
“I wouldn’t have our candidates spending the fall talking about Russia or the suit or anything like that,” Pepper said. “They should be focused on health care, education, student debt. We shouldn’t divert the message from those topics to talk about Russia.”
As another Midwestern strategist put it: “I would say it’s a nice stunt — should raise a lot of money. Doesn't do much to change the calculus in the heartland.”
LINK: Democrats Are Nervous (And Republicans Are Excited) About Minnesota
LINK: A Liberal Judge Won In Wisconsin — And That's A Bad Sign For Republicans This Year
One of the Democratic Party’s leading institutions grappled with a divisive internal battle over sexual harassment during and in the aftermath of the 2016 election, according to documents obtained by BuzzFeed News and interviews with 19 current and former staffers.
The Center for American Progress, the politics and policy hub for the Democratic establishment, has put out four different policy proposal papers on handling sexual harassment in the workplace, as well as data on how pervasive the issue is “across all industries.”
Neera Tanden
Joe McKendry for BuzzFeed News
The organization’s president, Neera Tanden, has vehemently criticized Republicans for their reaction to the accusations of sexual misconduct against President Donald Trump and wrote in a tweet still pinned to her profile, “I don't think the country has understood how psychologically wounding it was to so many women that Trump won after the Access Hollywood tape.”
But only an hour after the Access Hollywood tape was made public, top officials at CAP received an exit memo from a young woman who'd just quit detailing the sexual harassment she experienced from Benton Strong, a manager on her team — harassment, she wrote, that management already knew about — and how she faced retaliation for reporting it.
"I surely expected better out of an organization that housed a national campaign on sexual assault."
In the email, the junior staffer, who asked that BuzzFeed News refer her to as Mary, which is part of the woman’s formal name, wrote that “on several occasions, myself and others on the team felt as if reporting had been a mistake and that the retaliation, worsening of already tenuous team dynamics, and treatment by supervisors outweighed the seemingly positive act of reporting sexual harassment in the workplace.” When contacted about this story, the woman confirmed the authenticity of the exit memo, but declined to comment further, except to respond on Saturday to a statement from CAP.
“CAP’s culture obscures its mission,” Mary wrote, toward the end of her memo. “All of this to say, I surely expected better out of an organization that housed a national campaign on sexual assault.”
For young Democrats in particular, the Center for American Progress is a training ground, a place to work in progressive politics and policy for a few years under some of the most well-known and well-connected operatives in Washington. “These are important relationships,” as one former staffer described it. “You go along and you get along and they help you get a new job later.”
Documents obtained by BuzzFeed News and interviews with 19 current and former staffers describe a chaotic internal culture, in which, according to a July 2016 memo written by CAP’s employee union, there were “several incidents of sexual harassment against several members of our unit.” The documents and interviews pull back the curtain on a culture in which young staffers felt there was a gap between the organization’s mission and its everyday realities.
The memo — which union leaders never delivered to Tanden, but used as talking points in a meeting with her — laid out what members saw as CAP’s failures, both broadly and in the specific case of Strong, who had recently left the organization:
“Management failed to promptly take sufficient tangible employment action against the said employee for sexual harassment, thereby allowing the said employee’s behavior to escalate.
“Management has failed to present measures to correct the effects of the said employee’s sexual harassment, thereby perpetuating a hostile work environment.
“Management has failed to create a safe space upon which members of our unit — including those subjected to the said employee’s unlawful harassment — feel comfortable enough to report incidents of sexual harassment, among other forms of discrimination, without fear of retaliation or further harassment.
“Management has failed to take reasonable steps to prevent incidents of sexual harassment from occurring in the workplace.
“Management has failed to adequately inform employees of what constitutes unlawful harassment in the workplace, how to report such incidents, and what kind of recourse is available under such circumstances.”
The union wrote in its memo that while CAP “eventually took appropriate course of action,” management “failed to adequately address the situation.” And interviews with staffers suggest that the process at the time was messy.
According to the document, one proposal the union offered was that CAP hold a sexual harassment response training “in the immediate future” as well as periodically going forward. The union also wanted CAP to outline to staff how to report issues of harassment.
The union wrote in its memo that while CAP “eventually took appropriate course of action,” management “failed to adequately address the situation.”
Tanden refused, one former union member with intimate knowledge of the discussion told BuzzFeed News. “Neera’s approach was maybe we can start hosting brown bags with HR so people will feel more comfortable coming out and doing things. So they had almost a do-nothing approach. ... They said they would think about things that [the union brought up], and that was essentially it,” the former union member said.
In a statement to BuzzFeed News, CAP said that they did not receive the memo at the time or since, and that “most of the allegations” laid out in the memo “were not stated” during the actual meeting.
“They raised the need for CAP to be a safe space; we specifically asked them if they had heard of any other case of harassment or improper conduct. Other than what had been reported to us, they could not provide any,” CAP said in the statement, noting that Strong only had two reports made against him during his time with the organization, and that the union had not spoken with Mary. CAP said the union would have “no way of knowing that” Strong was disciplined after the first report.
Benton Strong
Joe McKendry for BuzzFeed News
CAP said that Tanden never refused to hold sexual harassment trainings, and that she had asked for union recommendations on improving trainings, but confirmed that she suggested hosting brown bags with HR in the context of the “need to ensure work was a safe space for CAP employees.” The organization pointed to a mandatory “inclusion” training they held in June 2016, which “included discussion of harassment,” while acknowledging that CAP received complaints that the training “was not sophisticated enough for our audience.”
Additionally, CAP said that they were “legally prohibited from making any unilateral changes to CAP policy” — including holding a new sexual harassment training or changing the organization’s sexual harassment policy — because of ongoing contract negotiations with the union. Two former union members noted that CAP could have engaged in a memorandum of agreement with the union to make changes to its sexual harassment policy or to add trainings, as they did when altering CAP’s overtime pay policy in January 2017.
CAP said in a statement that the union did not ask for a side agreement of that nature, so they did not pursue one. “If the union had asked us to negotiate a freestanding side agreement, as they did in the case of overtime policies, we would have done so,” they said.
“Our goal was to take steps that would address any concerns from the union,” CAP said, “but also respect the complainant’s request that we respect her privacy and not let details of the complaint get out.”
Not one of the 19 current and former employees interviewed for this story said they underwent workplace training about sexual harassment during their time at the organization. Five staffers mentioned the 2016 inclusion training, but said that it was focused on diversity and that discussion of sexual harassment was minimal.
CAP’s handling of the allegations against Strong came as a profound disappointment to the young progressive women who joined the organization, many of whom saw their jobs as an entrée to what they expected would be the Clinton White House.
In the first months of 2018, nearly two years after CAP’s employee union asked the organization to implement sexual harassment trainings, CAP released a new sexual harassment policy. Asked about this, CAP pointed to the collective bargaining process and said that CAP had asked the union to present “any proposed changes” to the policy. The union, which is under new management, said in a statement to BuzzFeed News that they “delivered a complete and entirely revamped sexual harassment policy following management’s solicitation for input” in late 2017 and that the new policy included “many of the Union’s recommendations.”
“The Union believes that this new policy, combined with what the Union hopes to be a robust rollout that includes future compliance trainings and efforts to educate staff about their rights under the policy, has the potential for marked improvements,” union leadership said in the statement. “However, if the Union does not feel that CAP is living up to its progressive values on this or other workplace issues, it has not and will not hesitate to make management aware and advocate for positive change.”
A man walks into the Center for American Progress, Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2018, at their office in Washington.
Jacquelyn Martin / AP
Founded by former Clinton campaign chair John Podesta in 2003, the Center for American Progress houses two groups, both of which work out of an office not far from the White House.
CAP, the main organization, focuses on policy; its campaign arm, the Center for American Progress Action Fund (CAP Action), works on advocacy. Tanden currently serves as the president of the sister organizations, which together employ more than 330 people. (CAP also controls ThinkProgress, an online progressive news organization fairly walled off from the main organization.)
CAP Action hired Strong in May 2014 as an associate director for communications, in what they call the “War Room,” a communications and advocacy shop that ultimately focused on the 2016 election during his time at the organization. Strong, a Seattle native, had run communications for the Washington State Democratic Party and the Climate Action Campaign, a grassroots group based in San Diego, before taking the job.
Two women filed complaints about Strong in 2016 — the first reported in May that Strong had asked several women on the team if they had been flashed or masturbated in front of and then mocked a woman in a team meeting for saying she had cried when it happened to her, and the second, Mary, reported that he had sent her a series of unwanted, sexually explicit text messages — according to interviews with current and former employees, as well as documents obtained by BuzzFeed News, including his personnel file.
Former Seattle Mayor Ed Murray speaks at a rally during the March for Science begins with a rally featuring speakers and events at Cal Anderson Park on April 22, 2017 in Seattle, Washington.
Karen Ducey / Getty Images
Shortly after the first woman — like Mary, a junior staffer in the War Room — reported Strong to HR in May 2016, Strong accepted a job with then–Seattle mayor Ed Murray, which was set to start on Aug. 1. In the weeks leading up to his departure from CAP, Strong also began sending sexual text messages to Mary, according to nine former staffers who viewed the messages or saw screenshots of them.
In her exit memo, Mary described receiving “lewd and inappropriate text messages” from Strong that caused her to feel “uncomfortable being in the workplace around him.”
Five former staffers told BuzzFeed News that they saw screenshots of a text in which Strong, a manager on Mary’s team (though not her direct supervisor), messaged Mary late at night saying that he wanted to perform oral sex on her. In other texts, Strong told Mary that he was discussing with several other male CAP staffers whether white women or black women were better at giving blow jobs; he repeatedly asked her to come over to his apartment or let him come over to hers for a drink; and he frequently made comments about her body. These messages were often interspersed with Strong asking Mary if he had crossed a “line” she had apparently drawn.
A friend of Mary’s, another former CAP employee who viewed the texts, said, “It was like incessant. ... It was like strings and strings of texts and her just being like ‘no no no.’”
In July 2016, after a work meeting and happy hour were held in Strong’s apartment building, Mary filed a complaint with CAP’s HR department. CAP said in a statement that this meeting was not mandatory and was in a “public common room at his apartment complex” in Strong’s apartment building, not his apartment itself.
In their statement, CAP said that after the report of “inappropriate text messages,” the HR department “immediately began an investigation of the incident, under the supervision of CAP’s general counsel and in consultation with outside employment law counsel. On the basis of our preliminary investigation, conducted over the course of a few hours that same day we received the report, we found that Mr. Strong had acted inappropriately, and told him not to return to the office, and not to retaliate against, or even contact, the complainant. He was escorted from the building that afternoon and never returned.”
She described retaliation she faced in the aftermath — including being asked whether she was “worth spending time or money on.”
Eric Thayer / Reuters
Sens. Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, and Kirsten Gillibrand have all suggested they would support plans for the federal government to guarantee a job for every American, rapidly moving a once-fringe progressive vision closer to the mainstream of Democratic politics.
Sanders’ plan, announced today, would give a $15-an-hour public works job, plus health benefits, to anyone who wants it, a vision reminiscent of parts of Franklin Roosevelt's Depression-era New Deal.
All three lawmakers are considered top contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, a fact that could tip the party towards embracing a version of the plan — just as the weight of the party has moved rapidly toward single-payer healthcare, or Medicare for all.
“This is about Democrats really working to develop big ideas — and being unshackled from this notion that we have to think small," said Ari Rabin-Havt, a senior adviser to Sanders.
"It's moving forward on a major issue with people across the Democratic Party taking part in this discussion,” he said. “If the debate in 2020 is about how big a jobs guarantee bill should be, that's a great thing."
A federal jobs guarantee program has failed to pick up steam until recently, even among the most progressive Democratic lawmakers. It would be sprawling, perhaps the size and scope of Medicare, and expensive — though Sanders' office hasn't even calculated cost, an estimate of another version of the plan, similar to the one embraced by Booker, put the price tag at $543 billion a year, not much less than the annual defense budget.
Booker put out a bill Friday for a pilot program that would test a jobs guarantee plan in 15 cities and counties across the country. In a statement, he called it "an idea that demands to be taken seriously."
Gillibrand, another Democratic Party star, told the left-wing magazine The Nation in March that she supported a jobs guarantee program. She tweeted last week that the government should invest $1.5 trillion — the estimated cost of the Republican tax cut — in guaranteeing jobs for Americans "unemployed and willing to work to better their local community.
LINK: With Popular Single-Payer Plan, Bernie Sanders Enters New Territory: A Wealth Tax
LINK: The Lefty Democratic Shift On Wall Street Is Happening For Real
Jake Tapper, CNN Anchor, and author of four books, including The Hellfire Club, which will be released Tuesday by Little, Brown and Company.
Nurphoto / Getty Images
Last month, the lawyer for a Russian businessman suing BuzzFeed over the Trump Dossier paused in the middle of my deposition to reveal which, among the thousands of documents we’d turned over in discovery, was his favorite.
The lawyer picked out a furious and colorful email Jake Tapper sent me the night we published the Dossier, in which Tapper expressed his disagreement with our decision to publish — and added that, “collegiality wise,” I had done something that he described with an intimate and painful-sounding metaphor.
The email reminded me of two things.
First that Tapper is an excellent writer.
And second, that one of the great secrets to his professional success is his all-out defense of his reputation on all fronts at all times: Before the Tappergram about the dossier, I’d heard from him more commonly about stray tweets from BuzzFeed staffers about everything from the poop cruise (his own coverage, he wanted to point out, had been serious and policy-focused) to the usual arguments over ratings. No tweet about Tapper, not even a subtweet, falls without Tapper’s notice.
“I don't have time for your high school drama club,” he said recently in his fourth rapid-fire tweet to a BuzzFeed News reporter who had botched, then quickly corrected, a Tapper quote.
Perhaps the best evidence of how fiercely Tapper protects his reputation is that — despite his irascibility being a kind of Washington legend — I can’t find any reference to it in a series of recent glowing profiles of the CNN anchor. These profiles tend to feature a relaxed-looking Tapper, surrounded by red, white, and blue memorabilia. Perhaps his feet are up on his desk. Tapper’s friends and acquaintances were rather surprised to learn, from the lede of a recent Times profile, that “Jake Tapper doesn’t seem to get rattled easily.”
Some of Tapper’s colleagues and Twitter enemies find the heated private responses to criticism over the top, a sign that he takes himself too seriously.
But I’ve always considered this thin skin a positive quality: Tapper should take himself seriously. He has a serious job, and has succeeded in part because he’s always engaged critics, including Twitter voices to the right and left of the mainstream television conversation, the kind of critics whom high-profile journalists often ignore. He’s the defining serious TV journalist of the Trump era for a reason.
The Hellfire Club
Little, Brown, and Company
And it takes a certain kind of seriousness of purpose to dive unapologetically into genre fiction, which Tapper has done in a fun and necessarily somewhat trashy political thriller called The Hellfire Club.
The novel is true to the genre: The story of a deadly conspiracy in the Eisenhower’s Washington is rich with period detail, sex, and murder, and boasts not just one but a handful of conspiratorial secret societies.
It has the best qualities of this sort of historical fiction, which include the winking perspective of the present. The protagonist, a young New York congressman named Charlie Marder, has thankfully anachronistic views that make him alive to Washington’s deep racism and gender inequality.
And Joe McCarthy has more than a little Donald Trump in him — full of lies and bluster, yet impossible to ignore: a planet “blocking out the sun.” McCarthy (and later Trump) consigliere Roy Cohn’s peace plan also sounds familiar: “He’d pick up the phone and call Joe Stalin and say, This is Joe McCarthy, I’m coming over tomorrow to talk about things….”
The media is largely absent from the novel. The courageous Walter Cronkite stands out from a mostly tame press corps.
But Tapper’s own anti-politics come through in the novel’s central conflict, and it helped me understand Tapper’s approach as well as anything else he’s said or written. In The Hellfire Club, McCarthy is a monster, ruining lives with careless lies. But Tapper, like the anti-Communist liberals of that day, goes out of his way to stress that the Communist conspiracy was real and that some of the accused — the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss — were guilty.
“McCarthy’s a drunk but he’s not wrong about everything,” Marder’s father tells him.
Our hero distinguishes himself by avoiding the seduction of either Moscow or the more than a little fascist Hellfire Club cult of the title, an entertaining fictional updating of a 17th century sex club whose members, here, include both McCarthy and the Kennedys. The heroic band he joins, in the end, is a third force, a dashing group organized around the president at the time, Dwight Eisenhower to save the Republic. This nameless force might be confused, in today’s terms, for the Deep State.
The novel is Tapper’s fourth book but his first work of fiction, and The Hellfire Club might not get glowing blurbs from James Patterson and Shonda Rhimes if it carried a different byline, its quality is a tribute to taking yourself seriously in all things.
