Telling Trump to Stop Blocking Critics on Twitter Doesn’t Affect the Platform’s Rules

Harvard law professor Noah Feldman worries that the recent First Amendment ruling against Donald Trump’s blocking of critics on Twitter could ultimately result in legal restrictions on the ability of social media companies to exclude users or regulate their speech. “This is the first time, to my knowledge, that the First Amendment has ever been applied to a private platform,” Feldman writes in a New York Times op-ed piece. He warns that “applying the First Amendment to social media will make it harder or even impossible for the platforms to limit fake news, online harassment and hate speech—precisely the serious social ills that the world is calling on them to address.”

Feldman argues that “social media should not become a pure free-speech zone,” that “the speech-based online abuses of our age need to be addressed not by the government but by the platforms on which they occur,” that “the platforms’ free-speech rights impose moral obligations on them,” and that “the free market will ensure that the platforms do their best to comply.” I agree with pretty much all of that, but I don’t agree that the Twitter decision, properly understood, poses a threat to those principles.

U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald’s May 23 ruling against Trump was not, in fact, the first time a public official has been rebuked for violating the First Amendment by excluding people from a social media account because of the opinions they expressed. Last July, for instance, a federal judge in Virginia, James Cacheris, concluded that Phyllis Randall, chair of the Loudon County Board of Supervisors, had violated a local gadfly’s First Amendment rights by banning him from her Facebook page after he posted a comment suggesting that members of the county school board had taken official actions that benefited their relatives. After that ruling, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan decided to settle a lawsuit by visitors to his Facebook page who complained that his office had deleted their comments and blocked them from posting because they had brought up a touchy subject by urging Hogan to criticize Trump’s ban on travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries.

In all three cases, elected officials used their social media accounts to conduct government business and presented them as conduits for communicating with their constituents while inviting responses from the general public. By doing so, the plaintiffs argued, the officials had created designated public forums, which cannot constitutionally discriminate against people based on their views. The lawsuits accused government officials, not Twitter or Facebook, of violating the First Amendment, which does not constrain private parties and in fact gives them a right to decide which speech will be allowed on their platforms. A similar analysis would apply to a town meeting in a rented hall or a government website on servers owned by a private company.

Feldman nevertheless sees a threat of judicial control over speech regulation by social media companies. “It’s not only people specifically blocked by President Trump’s account who can’t reply to him on Twitter,” he notes. “It’s also anyone excluded from Twitter by the platform itself, including those barred from Twitter for engaging in harassment or hate speech. Such parties may now sue Twitter, demanding access to the platform so they can post comments on Mr. Trump’s account.”

Anyone can sue anyone over anything, but that does not mean they can survive a motion to dismiss, let alone win. Buchwald’s decision, like Cacheris’s, focused on the actions of a government official; it said nothing about the supposed First Amendment obligations of a social media company. Loosely speaking, Buchwald affirmed a First Amendment right to follow the president on Twitter. But it would be more precise to say she affirmed a First Amendment right not to be blocked from the president’s Twitter account (specifically, the “interactive space” associated with his tweets) by the president (or his underlings) because something you said offended him. Trump is appealing the decision but in the meantime seems to be complying with it by unblocking the plaintiffs.

“If President Trump was able to create a public forum on Twitter without Twitter’s agreement to such a legal state of affairs,” Feldman says, “then it becomes more plausible to think that Twitter itself is a public space, regardless of whether it intends to be one.” Only if you ignore the crucial distinction between government action and private action when applying a constitutional provision that is explicitly aimed at the former. So far there is no evidence that the federal courts are inclined to do that.

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$1.25 Trillion: That’s The Cost Of Trump’s Trade Wars So Far, According To JPMorgan

Three months ago, in the aftermath of the February VIXplosion and when the shape of Trump’s protectionist agenda was only just starting to take shape, JPM’s head quant, Marko Kolanovic made a simple prediction: despite all his posturing, Trump would never dare to pursue an aggressive trade war that destabilizes markets for one simple reason – if stocks crash, it would make a Democratic victory more likely in the midterms, which in turn raises the threat of Trump getting impeached.

The JPM quant also laid out the various possible outcomes between trade war and Fed policy error in terms of a game theoretical “prisoners’ dilemma” matrix, as follows:

A significant trade war started by this administration would destabilize global equity markets. Should this happen ahead of the November election, it would impair the administration’s ‘market scorecard’ and likely lead to an election loss. Lost elections open a path to impeachment, and other complications. The game is also non-zero sum, as one can both use tough rhetoric and at the same time do little disruptive action (e.g., players as we defined them can ‘have their cake and eat it’). Setting up a diagram (similar to the well-known ‘prisoners’ dilemma’) points clearly that there will be strong rhetoric, but weak or no action that would destabilize equities.

One could argue that a similar analysis can be applied to the risk of the Fed committing policy errors (see figure below, asymmetry in the case of the Fed would be causing a recession, and the public pinning the blame to specific individual central bankers responsible for the decision).

Needless to say, back then Kolanovic was especially bullish, as he has been for much of the past year. And, for those who follow his musing, his bullishness has persisted until now – largely as a result of his views on investor positioning, which the quant believes is not bullish enough ever since the February flush which saw an outsized liquidation by many marginal market players – and which in light of the market action appears to have been accurate.

Fast forward to today when Kolanovic is out with a new note, in which he takes another look at the impact of Trump’s trade wars, now that they have had a chance to develop and mature, and his latest assessment appears far less optimistic than it was before, to wit:

In 2016, we argued that the probability of Trump winning the presidency was higher than the consensus and that it would likely be positive for equities. This double out-of-consensus view materialized as the new administration  enacted pro-market policies such as tax reform. However, since this March, the impact of trade and protectionist policies became a significant market headwind. It is a broad consensus across academia, business leaders and market practitioners that trade wars and protectionism are a lose-lose economic proposition.

But most notable is that Kolanovic’s original skepticism that Trump would never dare to roil the markets tremors appears to have faded, if not evaporated, and has been replaced with a big question mark, as not even Kolanovic can pretend he knows what Trump may say or do next. His epiphany is below:

Earlier in March we argued that the current administration cannot afford a disruptive trade war that would destabilize equity markets in an election year. While we still think this is true, trade tensions continue to inflict damage to investor psychology and business confidence. A negotiation strategy that includes bluffing/threats can be successful in a two-party negotiation setup, but is more likely to deliver self-defeating results in a complex system such as global trade (e.g., think of supply chain disruptions, the uncertainty it introduces in long-term planning, etc.).

More interesting is what Kolanovic does next, which is to put the cost-benefit or rather cost-cost analysis of Trump’s growing protectionist agenda in the context of the market moves over the past three months, or as he puts it, “we have attempted to quantify how the market value was impacted by trade war policies since March.” He explains how, and what the number is below:

By attributing the trade-related news flow (positive or negative) to the performance of the US market, we estimated the impact on US equities to be negative 4.5% (with a margin of error of +/-1%, Figure 1). Taking the current market capitalization, this translates into $1.25T of value destruction for US companies.

The number is notable because it is well over half, or nearly 2/3 of the value of Trump’s entire fiscal stimulus which has so far been the crowning achievement of the Trump administration.  What is perplexing to Kolanovic is why Trump would threaten to undo the fiscal stimulus by pursuing a populist agenda which has, in his view, little benefit to either the economy or to markets.

But more to the point, after being convinced that Trump would never engage in the kind of bi- and multilateral trade feuds as he has, the JPM strategist now concedes that Trump’s trade wars could in fact have an adverse impact on markets, especially if the trade wars persist.

The value destroyed by a trade war might be reversible if policies are reversed, while the positive impact of fiscal  measures is likely to remain. This would likely catalyze a ~4% market rally. However, if this uncertainty hangs over the market for a more extended period of time, the damage becomes more permanent and the probability of a disruptive tail event increases.

And there you have the investment case of Trump’s trade war: a favorable outcome would lead to a modest, 4% rally; meanwhile, a full blown, “nuclear” trade war and there is no bottom in sight. While the Upside/Downside does not strike us as particularly attractive, especially when the basis of the assessment is the assumption of Trump’s rationality, the bigger risk is that Trump himself may never have appreciated what Kolanovic said back in March, namely that a full blown trade war carries legitimate risks to Trump’s presidency. If indeed so, as Trump is increasingly eager to make his point, then the increasingly likely outcome is that one proposed by Goldman over the weekend, namely that for Trump to win his trade wars, the market has to crash.

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Recalling Aaron Persky, the Judge Who Showed Brock Turner Leniency, Is a Mistake That Will Haunt Progressives

PerskyResidents of Santa Clara County, California, voted yesterday to recall Aaron Persky, the superior court judge widely criticized for sentencing Stanford student Brock Turner to just six months in prison.

Turner was convicted in 2016 of sexually assaulting an incapacitated woman. Prosecutors had sought a six-year sentence, but Persky thought Turner probably wasn’t a danger to others and was concerned a lengthier prison stint would adversely impact him.

This outraged Stanford law professor Michelle Dauber—whose daughter is friends with Turner’s victim—and so Dauber launched a now-successful campaign to have Persky recalled from office. The point of the recall was to hold “white, privileged men accountable,” Dauber told The New York Times.

The prison component of Turner’s sentence was indeed lenient. But a simple fact has often been absent from this conversation: The six-month sentence wasn’t Persky’s idea, but rather the recommendation of the probation department. And even if Turner should have spent more time behind bars, he is still registered as a sex offender and likely will be for the rest of his life. He will have trouble finding a place to live, holding a job, and interacting with young people. Sex offenders are treated as pariahs and must obey onerous restrictions, even in cases where they pose almost no risk to others.

But even people who can’t muster any sympathy for Turner should still be concerned about what message Persky’s recall will send. I understand why members of the Stanford community were upset about the lenient treatment of Turner, and it’s easy to imagine white privilege had something to do with it. (The California Commission on Judicial Performance, it must be noted, found no “clear and convincing evidence of bias” in Persky’s decision-making.) But this recall is likely to encourage judges to be tougher in general lest angry voters come for them too. This was a blow to leniency for all criminal defendants.

Evidence already exists that judges impose harsher sentences around election time. According to a 2015 Brennan Center study, “The pressures of upcoming re-election campaigns affect judicial decision-making in criminal cases, making judges more likely to impose longer sentences, affirm death sentences, and even override sentences of life imprisonment to impose the death penalty.” When judges are subjected to normal political considerations, they unsurprisingly behave like politicians, for whom being tough on crime is usually a winning stance.

That’s one reason LaDoris Cordell, a retired California judge and self-described liberal feminist, vehemently opposed the recall effort, according to The Times:

Ms. Cordell wears her liberal stripes proudly, but she said she is worried the recall effort could influence judges who might otherwise show leniency in criminal sentencing, undermining a longtime goal to decrease the prison population. The impulse toward harsher sentencing, she said, is reminiscent of the measures that have fed large increases of prison populations, like California’s three-strikes law, which imposed an automatic life sentence for a third felony conviction.

Progressives who support criminal justice reform, the repeal of mandatory minimum sentencing, an end to mass incarceration, and rehabilitation should pause before cheering the recall of Judge Persky. The window to punish Turner has shut. The next person to come before a California judge might be a far less privileged defendant, hoping for mercy and less likely to get it.

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Brazil Battered: This Is What Happens When The Dollar Double Whammy Lands On You (Again)

Authored by Jeffrey Snider via Alhambra Investment Partners,

A recent poll in Brazil showed that one-third of Brazilians favor “military intervention.” The country had been gripped by a crippling trucker’s strike, the results of which have been almost complete economic shutdown. Intervention, as it is softly termed, would be nothing less than a coup.

The direct cause of the strike is quite simple. Under former President Dilma Rousseff, the state used national oil company Petrobras to subsidize the price of diesel. Monthly adjustments were made, but by and large any oil price fluctuations on global markets made little difference to the country’s vast fleet of trucks snaking their way over highways. It nearly bankrupted the company.

After Rousseff was impeached, her replacement Michel Temer removed the subsidy. Petrobras may be healthier for it, but the price of fuel has skyrocketed for anyone using diesel. Adjustments are often difficult.

But they have been made nearly impossible by what’s going on beyond the cost of keeping Brazil’s trucks, and truckers, moving. Like everywhere else on the planet, Temer’s government claims to have ended the recession and fostered recovery.

That’s true but only in the technical sense; there are now positive economic numbers in Brazil after years of only minus signs.

What the nationwide strike showed was not just the unrest created by uneasy shippers, it was the massive unease that permeates a country whose economy has shrunk.

Like Italians, Brazilians are starting to get the notion it isn’t coming back.

“We have watched a flirtation with collective suicide,” wrote rightwing commentator Reinaldo Azevedo, who compared Brazilians heading to the polls in October’s congressional and presidential elections to lemmings heading for a clifftop.

Leftist commentators are equally alarmed. “It is a dangerous moment,” said Laura Carvalho, a professor of economy at the University of São Paulo. “This is related to the economic crisis, the political crisis, the corruption scandals.”

Economic malaise or, dare I write, depression is a pressure vessel. Whatever social divisions will always exist wherever on Earth, they become increasingly untenable where hopelessness sets in without the medicine of opportunity. There’s a reason every political regime seeks robust economic growth, it reduces so many even serious social maladies.

The problem since 2008 is that this far into 2018 politicians keep calling it a recovery when it’s not. That can only make things worse, sowing further mistrust and even, as recent events have shown, the very real possibility of total political breakdown. Brazil is not some extreme outlier, it is merely ahead of the curve.

If one may wonder why India’s central bank chief took to the Financial Times this weekend to mildly plead with the Federal Reserve to do something (though that something would be just as ineffectual and irrelevant as anything the Fed has done or might do) about the world’s recent flaring “dollar” problems, this would be the prime example. In public, they all say recovery; in private, authorities might still use the term with each other but their fingers are crossed, their brows are furled, and they are surely covered in sweat while forming the word on their lips.

Many officials particularly in EM nations understand the peril. In the US, we were largely spared the wrath of the “rising dollar”, taking only a near recession downturn for that cause. But it’s something of a mistake to think we were lucky in that regard; it was merely a continuation of an eleven-year monetary saga without an end yet in sight. We took our lumps in 2008 and early 2009.

Many if not most EM economies survived the Great “Recession” with no prolonged collapse. They recovered quickly, but it didn’t last. By 2012, after the big eurodollar event in 2011, things were already coming apart. Brazil like China went through a noticeable rough spot in 2013, but that merely forewarned what was to come. To these places, what happened in 2015-16 was for them their 2008.

The statistics so far this year bear that out. While positive for the most part, again that is meaningless especially when compared to several years of serious contraction. A small rebound after a big drop is practically indistinguishable from that drop. This, quite naturally, appears to be the way Brazilians are feeling about the “recovery”, a sentiment they share with people all over the world – at least with those who are not currently sitting in some elected office.

From GDP to Industrial Production to Retail Sales, there is every indication that Brazil’s economy has seen its best of a rebound; and it wasn’t much. Like GDP (+1.2% year-over-year in Q1 2018, following +2.1% in Q4 2017 and +1.4% last Q3) there is the growing sense that things may already be slowing again after such a brief and small reprieve.

That all starts with, as always, the “dollar.” The one thing that doesn’t yet plague Brazil’s system is high consumer price inflation. During the real’s crash in 2014 and 2015, consumer prices necessarily skyrocketed as the cost of funding the country’s “dollar short” had to have been passed on to Brazil’s workers and consumers.

With this particular currency once again leading the renewed EM crisis, this small positive isn’t likely to be the case in the coming months.

There is every possibility that things could go from really bad to worse as BRL ticks back down toward 4.00, and the world’s Economists struggle to define let alone explain it.

And the media in the developed world will dismiss all of this as Brazil being Brazil, South America’s basket case reverting to type.

The siren song of globally synchronized growth has gripped all commentary, and they aren’t about to let it go now. Certainly not for the other side of the eurodollar when FOMC officials who despite their entire track recordassure everyone there couldn’t possibly be anything wrong in banks, banking, and funding. For them, there is no eurodollar system. For everyone who lives on Planet Earth, there is only continuing, escalating fallout from that which still does not officially exist. 

And despite intervention, the real is tumbling…

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Yelling ‘National Security’ Doesn’t Justify Terrible Government Policies: New at Reason

Rolls of steelWere he alive today, William Pitt the Younger might say about national security what he once said about necessity: It is “the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.”

It is also the go-to argument for President Trump.

The president has used national security as an excuse to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum. This has fooled exactly nobody. Not even Jim Mattis—who after all works for Trump and who, given his position as secretary of defense, should be especially sensitive to potential security threats—would buy it. Noting that the military consumes only 3 percent of U.S. steel and aluminum production, he disputed the Commerce Department’s view that national defense needs justified the tariffs. The Pentagon, he said, just didn’t need the help. A. Barton Hinkle explains further.

View this article.

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OIG Report Finds Comey “Defied Authority” And Was “Insubordinate”

The Department of Justice’s internal watchdog has found that James Comey defied authority several times while he was director of the FBI, according to ABC, citing sources familiar with the draft of a highly anticipated OIG report on the FBI’s conduct during the Clinton email investigation.

One source told ABC News that the draft report explicitly used the word “insubordinate” to describe Comey’s behavior. Another source agreed with that characterization but could not confirm the use of the term.

In the draft report, Inspector General Michael Horowitz also rebuked former Attorney General Loretta Lynch for her handling of the federal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s personal email server, the sources said. –ABC

President Trump complained on Tuesday of “numerous delays” in the release of the Inspector General’s report, which some have accused of being slow walked or altered to minimize its impact on the FBI and DOJ.

“What is taking so long with the Inspector General’s Report on Crooked Hillary and Slippery James Comey,” Trump said on Twitter. “Hope report is not being changed and made weaker!”

“It’s been almost a year and a half and it is time that Congress receives the IG report,” said Congressman Ron DeSantis (R-FL), who has been on the front lines of the battle against the DOJ and FBI’s stonewalling of lawmakers requesting documentation. “This has gone on long enough and the American people’s patience is wearing thin. We need accountability,” said DeSantis.

Another congressional official, who’s been fighting to obtain documents from the DOJ and FBI, said it is no surprise that they are putting pressure on Horowitz. According to the official, “They continue to slow roll documents, fail to adhere to congressional oversight and concern is growing that they will wait until summer and then turn over documents that are heavily redacted.”

–Sara Carter

ABC reports that there is no indication Trump has seen – or will see – the draft of the report prior to its release. Inspector General Horowitz, however, could revise the draft report now that current and former officials have offered their responses to the report’s conclusions, according to the sources. 

The draft of Horowitz’s wide-ranging report specifically called out Comey for ignoring objections from the Justice Department when he disclosed in a letter to Congress just days before the 2016 presidential election that FBI agents had reopened the Clinton probe, according to sources. Clinton has said that letter doomed her campaign.

Before Comey sent the letter to Congress, at least one senior Justice Department official told the FBI that publicizing the bombshell move so close to an election would violate longstanding department policy, and it would ignore federal guidelines prohibiting the disclosure of information related to an ongoing investigation, ABC News was told. –ABC

During an April interview, Comey was asked by ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos “If Attorney General Lynch had ordered you not to send the letter, would you have sent it?”

“No,” replied Comey. “I believe in the chain of command.” 

Deputy Attorney General slammed Comey’s letter to congress while recommending that Trump fire Comey last year – saying it “was wrong” for Comey “to usurp the Attorney General’s authority” when he revealed in July 2016 that he would not be filing charges against Hillary Clinton or her aides (many of whom were granted immunity). 

“It is not the function of the Director to make such an announcement,” Rosenstein wrote in a letter recommending that Comey be fired. “At most, the Director should have said the FBI had completed its investigation and presented its findings to federal prosecutors.”

The draft OIG report dings Comey for not consulting with Lynch and other senior DOJ officials before making his announcement on national TV. Furthermore, while Comey said there was no “clear evidence” that Hillary Clinton “intended to violate” the law, he also said that Hillary Clinton had been “extremely careless” in her “handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.” 

And as we now know, Comey’s senior counterintelligence team at the FBI made extensive edits to Clinton’s exoneration letter, effectively decriminalizing her behavior. 

“I have not coordinated or reviewed this statement in any way with the Department of Justice or any other part of the government. They do not know what I am about to say,” Comey said on live TV July 5, 2016.

By then, Lynch had taken the unusual step of publicly declaring she would accept the FBI’s recommendations in the case, after an impromptu meeting with former president Bill Clinton sparked questions about her impartiality.

Comey has defended his decisions as director, insisting he was trying to protect the FBI from even further criticism and “didn’t see that I had a choice.” –ABC

 “The honest answer is I screwed up a couple of things, but … I think given what I knew at the time, these were the decisions that were best calculated to preserve the values of the institutions,” Comey told ABC News. “I still think it was the right thing to do.“

Comey is currently on a tour promoting his new book, “A Higher Loyalty.” 

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For The First Time Since 1975, The Entire Swedish National Guard Was Just Mobilized

Authored by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper blog,

A few weeks back, the government of Sweden sent out a booklet to every household in the country urging citizens to prepare for war or other crises.

A few months back, they told citizens that they should be prepared to last for at least a week without any help from the government.

Last night, in the most unsettling move yet, they mobilized the entire Swedish Home Guard for an “unannounced preparedness exercise.” All 40 battalions have been activated, effective immediately.

The report is on the Försvarsmakten website, which is the official website of the Swedish Armed Forces. Here’s the English translation:

For the first time since 1975, the Armed Forces carry out an unannounced emergency preparedness control of the entire Hemvärnet. All staff around Sweden who are part of one of the 40 home war battalions and who have the opportunity to attend the evening of 5 June and during the national day will be in charge of service. The alarm is ordered by the Armed Forces and participation in the exercise is voluntary.

“We are committed to strengthening Sweden’s defense and increasing our operational capabilities. This is a way to do it. This exercise is great in several ways. We are testing the emergency chain for almost half our intervention organization, we have not done since 1975, says Micael Bydén, the commander.

Initially, staff – from north to south – will be contacted and invited to stand for service. Thereafter, relations will begin to solve tasks, such as protection, guarding and patrolling. During the national day, home care personnel will be seen in many places around the country, from ports and airports to streets and squares. Since it is a voluntary exercise, the Armed Forces can not force anyone to settle, but the chief commander shows great confidence in his staff. (source)

What this means

The Hemvärnet is the Swedish equivalent of the American National Guard.

The Home Guard – National Security Forces (Swedish: Hemvärnet – Nationella Skyddsstyrkorna) is a military reserve force of the Swedish Armed Forces. It was formally established on May 29, 1940, during World War II upon popular demand. While originally composed of former militia groups, today it comprises half of the Swedish Army, thus constituting the basis of the territorial defense of Sweden.

The Swedish National Home Guard consists mainly of local rapid response units, numbering 17,000 of the 22,000 total Home Guard strength, organized in 40 battalions, with 23 associated auxiliary defense organizations. (source)

This “unannounced preparedness exercise” may be just that – a readiness drill. But there are a few things that ring some warning bells for me:

  • A “drill” of this magnitude hasn’t happened since 1975 at the height of the Cold War

  • It’s occurring on the heels of two other warnings of looming war or crises

  • And keep in mind that the war preparedness book that was recently sent out mentioned the possibility of re-establishing conscription (the draft), too.

The Swedish website, The Local, reports:

The exercise is part of Sweden’s national effort to rebuild its Cold War Total Defence strategy in response to an increasingly belligerent Russia. The last time Sweden’s Armed Forces called up the entire Home Guard at once was in 1975 at the height of the Cold War.

Just a week ago Sweden’s Civil Contingencies Agency sent out its “If Crisis or War Comes” brochure to more than four million Swedish households, advising them to stock up on water, tinned and dry food, and other essentials to increase Sweden’s resilience.

The country also last month reestablished a regiment on the Baltic island of Gotland.

In the event of an invasion, Sweden’s Home Guard is responsible for protecting the core functions of the Swedish state, guarding government agencies, airports, or ports, so that the professional army is free for front-line duties. (source)

It would be wise to be on the lookout for something to happen soon.  What that “something” might be, of course, is open to speculation.

What do you think is going on?

Could they be preparing to quell a migrant uprising in the no-go zones or are they truly concerned about a threat from Russia?

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Cambridge Analytica Director Met With Assange To “Discuss US Election”

Just ahead of what would be Alexander Nix’s second appearance before the the Commons digital, culture, media and sport (DCMS) select committee, The Guardian reports that a senior executive at Cambridge Analytica had visited Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in person, raising new questions about the connection between the two firms. 

Brittany Kaiser, who had served as a director at Cambridge until earlier this year, said she had been in close contact with Wikileaks’ founder Julian Assange, even traveling to see him inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London and funneling money to Wikileaks’ bank accounts using cryptocurrency. 

Kaiser

Brittany Kaiser

Both Cambridge and Wikileaks are already part of Robert Mueller’s investigation.

The connection between the two firms wasn’t publicly known until October last year, when it was revealed that Cambridge had “reached out” to Assange and Wikileaks and offered to help them index the missing 33,000 Hillary Clinton emails. Assange said in a statement that he had turned down Cambridge’s offer.

Kaiser had been a director at the firm until earlier this year. She visited Assange on Feb. 17, 2017 under the pretext of discussing the outcome of the US election, and reportedly referred to Wikileaks as her “favorite charity.” Reports about her activities eventually reached investigators, who sought to make it public.

When Kaiser appeared before MPs in April, she acknowledged that some employees at the company had contact with lawyers who also represented Assange. During his first appearance before the committee, Nix had said that “we have no relationship with Wikileaks. We have never spoken to anyone at Wikileaks. We have never done any business with Wikileaks. We have no relationship with them, period.”

In fact, Nix said he only attempted to reach out to Assange after hearing about Hillary Clinton’s missing emails in the news. Nix said he got in contact with Assange via a speaking agency that represented Wikileaks.

During Kaiser’s testimony before the DCMS committee, Chairman Damian Collins asked her whether Nix was aware that he could contact Assange through her. Kaiser said that Nix could’ve asked her to put him in touch with Assange, but that he apparently chose not to. As she explained her connection to Assange, Kaiser revealed that she met the Wikileaks founder through his former lawyer, John Jones QC, who had represented Assange in his extradition case and later became a close personal friend. Jones’s former legal assistant, Robert Murtfeld, who worked closely with him on the Wikileaks case, subsequently went to wok  for Cambridge Analytica as director of commercial sales.

Meanwhile, as we noted overnight, Nix faces serious questions from his investors also as they claim he stole over $8 million from the firm before its collapse.

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There’s ‘No Evidence That Having Sex With Robots Is Healthy’ and No Evidence That It’s Not

There’s “no evidence that having sex with robots is healthy,” The Washington Post wants you to know. Similar headlines grace the pages of USA Today (“There’s no evidence having sex with robots is healthy, report says“), The Verge (“no evidence that sex robots provide health benefits“), CNBC (“Sex robots offer little evidence of any health benefits“), and many other outlets, sometimes with an added dose of alarmism (“Sex robots could empower pedophiles and sex offenders“) or millennialism (“There’s literally no research proving sex robots are good for society“).

These headlines are all true, more or less, but they omit an important fact: There’s also “literally no research” showing that sex robots unhealthy, that they don’t hold therapeutic promise, or that they will be bad for society. There’s just no evidence about sex robots period, because at present they don’t really exist.

The authors of a new article in BMJ Sexual & Reproductive Health—the study behind all those headlines—admit as much when it comes to the lack of evidence. “We found no reports of primary data relating to health aspects of the use of sex robots,” write Chantal Cox-George, a doctor at London’s St. George’s Hospital, and Kings College Professor of Women’s Health Susan Bewley.

They are trickier when it comes to the current state of sexbots. The definition of sex robot that they offer doesn’t include artificial intelligence, or even robotics, as necessary components: “Sex robots are realistic mannequins with variable ages, appearances and textures, and customisable oral, vaginal, and anal openings.” But basically everything else in the paper implies that we are talking about not just mannequins but moving, talking, artificially intelligent creatures.

Cox-George and Bewley assert that there are currently four companies selling “adult sexbots,” but they don’t explain anything more about the products these companies make. If they had, readers would learn that the closest thing to sexbots at present are simply life-size dolls with very basic digital flourishes. (Think Siri inside a RealDoll, not the sentient android denizens of Westworld.)

But maybe it makes little difference: A lack of actual sexbots in the world hasn’t stopped decades of folks freaking out over the possibility of randy AI-enabled companions. The only difference these days is a persistent (and wrong) belief that they are already here or right around the corner.

The Post article quotes all sorts of sexbot alarmists (including the founder of a Campaign Against Sex Robots), as well as pop-media hype about the therapeutic potential of sexual and romantic relationships with robots. Cox-George and Bewley’s article affects an air of more serious scholarship, but it cites only the same sexbot speculation you can find shared on your Facebook feed or gracing Google News every few months.

Using Google and PubMed searches, Cox-George and Bewley relied on results from HuffPost, The Guardian, The Atlantic, the Daily Mail, The Independent, The New York Times, and other consumer-facing media, along with information from the Campaign Against Sex Robots and Foundation for Responsible Robotics websites. From these sources, the doctors absorbed the same old (highly unscientific and culture-war-tinged) controversies surrounding not just sex robots but also sex workers, prostitution, pornography, virtual reality, and sexual assault, then summarized these controversies briefly.

The article does not unveil any new scientific evidence about sex robots, does not synthesize previous evidence, does not even offer any compelling new speculation on the topic. The authors simply regurgitate pop-media coverage and controversies regarding sex dolls and sexbots and then suggest that more research is needed.

Until “robust, scientific, and ethically acceptable research trials” can be conducted, medical professionals should “reject the clinical use of sexbots,” they conclude. They also suggest that “doctors might be advised to avoid using sexbots themselves, given police interest, prosecutions, and the potential negative impact on public trust.”

But whatever doctors do with sexbots—on their own time or in clinical practice—public interest in them isn’t going anywhere. For a more positive view of their potential, check out this feature from Reason‘s 2015 “Hi, Robot!” issue.

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Bombshell Claim Raises New Questions: Mueller Threatened To Charge Papadopoulos As Unregistered Agent Of Israel

Special Counsel Robert Mueller threatened to charge former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos as an unregistered agent of Israel, according to his wife.

Simona Mangiante Papadopoulos, an Italian attorney who married Papadopoulos roughly 90 days ago, claimed that Mueller had evidence her husband had worked on behalf of Israel without registering as a foreign agent during his time as an energy consultant, and prior to joining the Trump campaign. The claim was made in interviews with the Daily Caller and the Washington Post – where Simona also said George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to avoid the Israel-linked charges.

“I know he doesn’t have anything to do with Russia,” she told The Post. “We know he was under scrutiny because of his ties to Israel, not his ties to Russia. So what’s this about?”

In October 2015, Papadopoulos wrote a column for the Israeli publication Haaretz entitled “Natural Gas Isn’t Just about Israel.” He also attended a series of energy conferences in Israel, including one held in April 2016, just days after he was named to Trump’s campaign, according to Israeli media accounts.

During those years, he became acquainted with Eli Groner, who has served since 2015 as a top aide to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. –WaPo

Simona’s new claims are vastly different than what she said in January before she and George married – when she suggested to the Washington Post that Papadopoulos would be remembered like John Dean, the former White House counsel who flipped on Nixon’s administration and became a key witness. 

“There’s a lot to come,” she said then. “He was the first one to break a hole on all of this.”

On Tuesday, however, her tune had changed – saying that her earlier comments were misinterpreted and that she and George had reassessed events after learning that Cambridge professor Stefan Halper had been conducting espionage on the Trump campaign for the FBI. Halper hired Papadopoulos to write an energy paper in London in the fall of 2016, paying him $3,000 for his efforts.

“George took responsibility for lying to the FBI and cooperated with the government. Cooperating doesn’t mean following an agenda,” she said. “Cooperating doesn’t mean against the president. . . . It means cooperating with the truth.” 

Simona says George has been wronged and deserves a pardon from President Trump – that he is “a victim, honestly,” who “made a mistake. He pleaded guilty for that mistake. It would make sense for the president to pardon him.”

Before joining the Trump campaign in March 2016 as a foreign policy advisor, George Papadopoulos lived in London, working as a researcher for the Hudson Institute think tank, and later as an independent energy consultant. Despite his work on Israel, Cyprus and Greece while at the Hudson Institute, a person familiar with the Institute told the Washington Post that nobody from the Special Counsel’s office has ever contacted them regarding Papadopoulos’s work there. 

Meanwhile, it was Papadopoulos’ May 10 alleged “drunken barroom admission” to former Australian diplomat Alexander Downer that the Russians had information which “could be damaging” to Hillary Clinton. Papadopolous was originally told of the allged Russian plot two weeks earlier on April 26, by Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud (missing since October 2017) – whose organization George Papadopoulos met his wife through.

Which brings us to an interesting thread…

Noting that Papadopoulos and his new wife met on LinkedIn, Twitter user @rising_serpent makes the case that some things just aren’t adding up. The 27-part tweetstorm is condensed underneath the first post: 

2. That connection was Joseph Mifsud, a most mysterious former Maltese government official who ran an institute called the London Centre of International Law Practice in Britain. THE Joseph Mifsud now made infamous by her husbands indictment by Robert Muller.

3. Mangiante, started working at the organization after meeting Mifsud while she was employed at European Parliament in Brussels. Papadopoulos, who had worked for Mifsud’s organization as well, reached out to say he liked her profile picture.

(article: George Papadopoulos, his bride-to-be, and the Russia-linked ‘professor’ who brought them together)

4. Mangiante left the London Centre of International law after three months, after concluding the law office was “a facade for something else.” But the two continued to talk over the Internet, before meeting in person for the first time in New York in spring 2017.

5. Mangiante was introduced to Mifsud in 2012 by Gianni Pittella, a well-known Italian MEP who in 2014 became president of the Socialists and Progressive Democrats group. “I always saw Mifsud with Pittella,” So, Mangiante knew Mifsud for many years before she did Papadopoulos

6. Mangiante worked for 2 European parliament officials, Mairead McGuinness, a vice-president & McGuinness’s Italian predecessor Roberta Angelilli. She was also admin to home affairs committee under Martin Schulz, then a German MEP & now leader of Germany’s Social Democrats

7. So Mangiante moved within the corridors of power within Europe’s Italian Democrats & German social democrats. When her contract expired, Pittella suggested she go work for Mifsud in London who offered her a job in 2016 at the London Centre of International Law Practice

8. in September 2016, Mangiante received a message on the LinkedIn social network from George Papadopoulos. Papadopoulos had worked at the same London Center of International law centre briefly before joining Trump’s campaign. That was the beginning of their acquaintance.

9. It appears that Mangiante started her job around September 2016, the same time as she started corresponding with Papadopoulos. Mangiante was not happy with her work in London.

(article: The boss, the boyfriend and the FBI: the Italian woman in the eye of the Trump-Russia inquiry)

10. The entire institution seemed “fake”, “artificial”, with Mifsud interested solely in organising political meetings. “I didn’t smell a culture of academia” Mifsud’s diplomatic activity, Mangiante now believes, was a facade. “I never met any Russians there”

11. Mangiante quit her post there after three months, in November 2016. In the meantime, Mangiante’s romance with George began. After several unsuccessful efforts to get together in London, they met in March 2017 in New York. They hit it off, began dating and fell in love

12. Prior to meeting Mangiante, FBI had interviewed Papadopoulos Jan 2017 in connection with the collusion investigation. Papadopoulos gave federal agents a false account of his meetings with Mifsud. So he deleted his Facebook account and changed his cellphone number.

13. So almost 3 months prior to Papadopoulos actually meeting Mangiante he was already in the crosshairs of FBI, he was deleting facebook, changing phone numbers and like James Bond, was actively romancing a beautiful woman. Plausibility check # 1, what do you think ?

14. On the day Papadopoulos pleaded guilty, Mangiante was at her boyfriend’s family home in Chicago. There was a ring at the door. A casually dressed man informed her that he was a federal agent. He was serving her with a subpoena from Mueller.

15. Mangiante decided not to hire a lawyer after discovering they cost $800 an hour. She turned up alone at Chicago FBI headquarters. the FBI was interested in her relationship with Papadopoulos. Was it genuine? “They asked: “Do you love him?” “Yes”. They replied: ‘He is lucky’”

16. Plausibility check # 2. Do you think about how much lawyers cost when the FBI tells you that your boyfriend is chin deep in legal manure and you may be too? Stormy Daniels gets a lawyer for free, but someone being investigated by the FBI thinks about a lawyers cost?

17. March 2016 Papadopoulous learned he would be Trumps foreign policy advisors, he ended up meeting Mifusud on March 14 2016 while he was traveling in Italy (where Mangiante was, coincidentally). Important: He met Mifsud first in Italy, see indictment (click here)

18. Mifusd’s interest is piqued when he learned that Papadopoulos was going to be involved with the Trump campaign. They meet again subsequently in London on March 24th 2016 when Mifusd was accompanied by the “Putins niece” Olga Vinogradova, who like Mifsud has now disappeared.

19. Papadopoulos met Mifusd again on April 24th 2016 for breakfast at a London hotel. This is the first time that Mifsud tells him he knows the Russians have “dirt” on Hillary. Mind you the DNC leaks weren’t published till June/July 2016. Important point right there.

20. That DNC was hacked by the Russians remains a matter of great contention and those with exquisite expertise in cybersecurity don’t agree with the assertion that Russians hacked it. Remember the only people that conducted the investigation into the hack were CrowdStrike

21. Now we turn the bizarre dial to 11, why did Papadopoulos say to Mangiante when he was looking at her LinkedIn profile that they worked for the same company? Two things wrong with this: I couldn’t find any evidence that Paps worked for the London center of international law

22. and if he did, he would have known Mifsud from his work, so the whole theory of his being introduced to Mifusd falls flat.

23. The BIG question: by the time Papadopoulos began corresponding with Mangiante in Sept 2016, he was a part of the Trump Campaign, what was he looking at LinkedIn profiles of people working at the London center of international law for? What am I missing here? 

24. I have more questions than answers, but the timeline just doesn’t add up, there is a lot missing here apart from my functioning neuronal circuitry. All of this is important in the context of Mangiante’s recent media blitz and her asking for Trump to pardon Papadopoulos.

25. Feel free to add to what I have just outlined. Things are not only a little askew here but seems that we are seeing this whole matter askance and many facts are obscured by layers of hearsay disguised as factual information. -fin.

26. Addendum: anybody else find it most peculiar that Mangiante worked for Italian and German social democrats? Especially now that we know that MI6 (Downer/Steele/Halper) were probably involved with the genesis of the Steele dossier?

27. Mifusud appears to be more aligned with the UK than he is with the Russians, Mangiante herself said so. Also she has since dialed down her touting of her husbands role in the Trump campaign, why?

Questions?

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