Tag: U.K.

(BLACK PRIVILEGE) – Criminal charges dropped in case against Jussie Smollett, attorneys say

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Chicago prosecutors have dropped criminal charges against ‘Empire’ star and alleged hate crime hoaxer Jussie Smollett. The actor had been indicted on 16 felony counts for faking a ‘racist and homophobic’ attack on himself.

Smollett claimed in January that two masked men wearing red hats yelled racial slurs at him, put a noose around his neck, poured bleach on his skin and shouted “This is MAGA country” – a reference to President Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ catchphrase. Smollett’s case began to unravel, however, after it emerged that the actor allegedly paid two Nigerian brothers to stage the attack.

Smollett’s initial story captivated outrage-hungry politicians and media figures. 2020 presidential candidates Sen. Kamala Harris (D-California) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) called the supposed attack a “modern day lynching,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California) called it an “act of hatred and bigotry,” and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) called it “an affront to our humanity.”

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All of these Democrat leaders deleted their tweets when Smollett himself was arrested and charged in February.

After the charges against him were dropped on Tuesday, Smollett’s attorneys said that their client “was a victim who was vilified and made to appear as a perpetrator as a result of false and inappropriate remarks made to the public causing an inappropriate rush to judgement.”

Prosecutors dropped the case after “reviewing all of the facts and circumstances,” and taking into account Smollett’s volunteer service in the community. His lawyers, without a trace of irony, called the case “a reminder that there should never be an attempt to prove a case in the court of public opinion.”

The prosecutors’ decision shocked conservatives, some of whom viewed Smollett’s easy ride as a form of “leftist privilege,” and District Attorney Kimberly Foxx’s membership of the Democratic party as instrumental in her decision to let Smollett off the hook.

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‘EMPIRE’ BOMBSHELL! SMOLLETT CHARGES DROPPED STAR STICKS TO STORY HE WAS ATTACKED COMMUNITY SERVICE CASE SEALED CHICAGO POLICE ‘FURIOUS’

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CHICAGO (CBS) — Less than two weeks after “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett pleaded not guilty to 16 counts of disorderly conduct for allegedly lying to police about a hate crime, prosecutors have dropped charges in the case.

Cook County prosecutors agreed to drop the charges against Smollett at an unscheduled hearing in the case Tuesday morning. Smollett will forfeit the $10,000 bail he posted after his arrest.

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“After reviewing all of the facts and circumstances of the case, including Mr. Smollett’s volunteer service in the community and agreement to forfeit his bond to the City of Chicago, we believe this outcome is a just disposition and appropriate resolution to this case,” the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office stated in an email.

Sources tell CBS 2 that CPD Superintendent Eddie Johnson is furious and that he received no notification about the charges being dropped. CBS 2 is told that he will speak after the police graduation taking place.

Smollett’s spokesperson said his record would be “fully expunged.”

“Today, all criminal charges against Jussie Smollett were dropped and his record has been wiped clean of the filing of this tragic complaint against him. Jussie was attacked by two people he was unable to identify on January 29th. He was a victim who was vilified and made to appear as a perpetrator as a result of false and inappropriate remarks made to the public causing an inappropriate rush to judgement,” spokeswoman Anne Kavanaugh stated in an email.

“Jussie and many others were hurt by these unfair and unwarranted actions. This entire situation is a reminder that there should never be an attempt to prove a case in the court of public opinion. That is wrong. It is a reminder that a victim, in this case Jussie, deserves dignity and respect. Dismissal of charges against the victim in this case was the only just result.

“Jussie is relieved to have this situation behind him and is very much looking forward to getting back to focusing on his family, friends and career.”

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A judge also granted a motion to seal the case.

More details are expected soon, after an unscheduled emergency hearing Tuesday morning.

Smollett was accused of falsifying a police report, and lying to police. Each of the 16 counts against him covers various alleged acts that Smollett falsely described to the officers–including that he was hit by two men, that they yelled racial and homophobic slurs and poured a chemical on him.

Smollett, who is black and openly gay, had told police he was attacked as he was walking home around 2 a.m. on Jan. 29. He claimed two masked men – one of them also wearing a red hat – shouted racist and homophobic slurs as they beat him, put a noose around his neck, and poured a chemical on him.

Police said, in reality, Smollett had paid Ola and Abel Osundairo to stage the attack.

CBS 2’s Charlie De Mar has reported Smollett also directed the brothers to buy the noose at a hardware store and the hat and masks at a store in Uptown. Chicago Police Supt. Eddie Johnson said police have the check.

Police said the two brothers wore gloves during the staged attack, and did punch Smollett, but the scratches and bruises on Smollett’s face most likely were self-inflicted.

Police at the time said the attack was a publicity stunt because the actor was upset about his pay on the show.

Smollett has denied all the allegations.

More on Jussie Smollett:

Brothers At The Center Of Jussie Smollett Case In A Different Fight: The Boxing Ring

While actor Jussie Smollett fights for his freedom, the two brothers at the center of his case were involved in a different kind of fight Thursday night.

Jussie Smollett Pleads Not Guilty To Disorderly Conduct Indictment; Accused Of Orchestrating Hate Crime Hoax

“Empire” actor Jussie Smollett pleaded not guilty Thursday to 16 counts of disorderly conduct, nearly a week after he was indicted for allegedly lying to police about a hate crime.

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CNN Zucker: No Regrets… (THE MEDIA IS THE ENEMY)

NEW YORK, NY - MARCH 15: President of CNN Jeff Zucker attends the grand opening of phase one of the Hudson Yards development on the West Side of Midtown Manhattan, March 15, 2019 in New York City. Four towers, including residential, commercial, and retail space, and a large public art …

By Joshua Caplan

CNN Worldwide president Jeff Zucker is pushing back against critics accusing the news network of being one of the chief propagators of a debunked Trump-Russia conspiracy theory after special counsel Robert Mueller cleared the president’s 2016 campaign of alleged collusion with the Kremlin.

In an interview with the New York Times, Zucker said he was “entirely comfortable” with CNN’s Trump-Russia coverage and suggested it was entirely appropriate to give near around-the-clock-coverage due to the story’s magnitude. “We are not investigators. We are journalists, and our role is to report the facts as we know them, which is exactly what we did,” the CNN chief wrote in an email. “A sitting president’s own Justice Department investigated his campaign for collusion with a hostile nation. That’s not enormous because the media says so. That’s enormous because it’s unprecedented.”

According to a four-page summary of Mueller’s findings written by the Justice Department, investigators found no evidence President Trump’s campaign “conspired or coordinated” with Russia to influence the election.

Zucker neglected to mention CNN’s steady stream of conspiracy-theory punditry and several stories which proved demonstrably false.

Last December, CNN congressional correspondent Manu Raju reported that Wikileaks emailed Donald Trump Jr. access to information nearly two weeks prior to their public release. However, the network failed to verify the email’s date — September 14th, 2016 — by which time the emails had already been released. In June, CNN reported former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci was being investigated for meeting with a Russian banker ahead of President Trump’s inauguration. Scaramucci denied the claim and CNN eventually apologized for its inaccurate report. CNN Executive editor Lex Haris, editor Eric Lichtblau, and journalist Thomas Frank resigned in shame over the story.

Further, CNN claimed in July that Michael Cohen, President Trump’s personal lawyer, was prepared to tell special counsel investigators that the president possesses advanced knowledge of the Trump Tower meeting between his son, Donald Trump Jr. and a Russia lawyer, and others. Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, later told CNN had “mixed up” its facts and denied claims that Cohen had any such knowledge about the meeting.

Over the course of the Mueller probe, CNN gave a platform to Trump-Russia collusion pushers such as Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Washington Post opinion writer Max Boot. For example, appearing February 19th on CNN’s State of the Union, Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, claimed that there is “compelling” evidence in “plain sight” of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

“You can see evidence in plain sight on the issue of collusion, pretty compelling evidence. Now, there’s a difference between seeing evidence of collusion and being able to prove a criminal conspiracy beyond a reasonable doubt,” Schiff told host Dana Bash.

In 2017, an undercover investigator for Project Veritas filmed CNN Supervising Producer John Bonifield saying that the Russia conspiracy theory was “mostly bullshit” and the network was promoting it so heavily — without real evidence — “because it’s ratings.”

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19 Politicians, Hollywood Stars, Media Elites Who Fantasized for Years About Mueller Indicting Trump Repeatedly Claimed Mueller ‘Closing In’

By Alana Mastrangelo

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Politicians, Hollywood stars, and media elites spent roughly two years echoing the words “Mueller is closing in” as they fantasized about President Donald Trump and his family being indicted over so-called Russian collusion during the 2016 presidential election. But on Sunday, the Department of Justice announced that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation did not find evidence that the president’s campaign “conspired or coordinated” with the Russian government, “despite multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign.”

“To my fellow Trump critics: Do not despair. Do not give up. Do not reduce your outrage,” tweeted actor Tony Schwartz reacting to the president’s 2017 tax bill, “Tax cuts are a fake victory that will come back to haunt him & Republicans. Mueller is closing in on Trump, I promise!”

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“If true, the Buzzfeed story is a political earthquake. Caution: we really know little; Mueller knows much. Time to be steady, let facts lead us to truth — The walls do appear to be closing in.” tweeted journalist Dan Rather in reference to an anti-Trump BuzzFeed report from January, which turned out to be fake news.

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Check out a few more of the politicians, Hollywood stars, and media elites who fantasized about “Mueller closing in” on the president and his family over the Russia collusion hoax.

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First son Donald Trump Jr. said in a statement on Sunday that Attorney General William Barr’s letter to Congress on the Mueller report has finally proven “what those of us with sane minds have known all along.”

As for everybody else, their focus appears to be shifting onto the Attorney General and even the Special Counsel, as House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY) calls on William Barr to testify before Congress, and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) floats the idea of subpoenaing Robert Mueller.

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SHAME OF THE NATION: 533,074 articles have been published about Russia and Trump… Networks Gave Whopping 2,284 Minutes to Probe… CNN STILL sitting outside Mueller’s office…

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By Rich Noyes | March 25, 2019

The amount of time and energy that the media elite — cable news, big newspapers, etc. — have spent talking and writing about the notion that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia is incalculable, but here’s one calculable slice: From January 20, 2017 (Inauguration Day) through March 21, 2019 (the last night before special counsel Robert Mueller sent his report to the Attorney General), the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts produced a combined 2,284 minutes of “collusion” coverage, most of it (1,909 minutes) following Mueller’s appointment on May 17, 2017.

That’s an average of roughly three minutes a night, every night, for an astonishing 791 days — a level of coverage normally associated only with a major war or a presidential election. In fact, TV reporters devoted more airtime to the Russia investigation than any of the Trump administration’s policy initiatives — immigration, tax reform, trade, North Korea, ISIS, the economy, veterans’ affairs, the opioid epidemic, to name but a few. Since his presidency began, nearly one-fifth (18.8%) of all of Trump’s evening news coverage has been about this one investigation.

The networks’ fixation on scandal over substance is one reason their coverage of the President has been so preposterously lopsided. From January 1 through March 21 of this year, the spin of Trump coverage on the evening newscasts has been 92% negative vs. just eight percent positive — even worse than the 90% negative coverage we calculated in 2017 and 2018.

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[To determine the spin of news coverage, our analysts tallied all explicitly evaluative statements about the President or his administration from either reporters, anchors or non-partisan sources such as experts or voters. Evaluations from partisan sources, as well as neutral statements, were not included.]

For those who spend all of their time on their phones or glued to 24-hour cable news, note that these shows still matter: despite today’s fractured media environment, the Big Three evening newscasts still have a larger audience than either their morning show counterparts or even the biggest cable news shows — a combined 24 million people, according to ratings compiled the week of February 25.

Back on March 10, two weeks before the Mueller report was delivered, ABC’s Terry Moran publicly warned that there would be “a reckoning for the media” if there report failed to deliver evidence to validate journalists’ years-long suspicion that the “current President of the United States assist[ed] the Kremlin in an attack on our democracy.” According to the summary delivered Sunday afternoon, “the Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”

Even before that conclusion was made public, anti-Trump journalist Matt Taibbi argued that the “news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is headed home without issuing new charges is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media.”

As much as any of their hyperbolic spin, the massive onslaught of coverage during the past two years starkly reveals the media’s mindset. Now that the investigation they relentlessly touted has ended with an outcome favorable to the President they despise, it does seem a good time for that “reckoning.”

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It Was All A Fraud: ‘No More Indictments’ Coming From Mueller Probe, Multiple Outlets Report

By Chris Menahan

Fox News, ABC News, CNN and others are reporting Department of Justice sources told them there will be “no more indictments” coming from Robert Mueller‘s Russia probe.

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The lying media is not taking the news well:

Tucker Carlson had an excellent rundown of this colossal fraud:

 

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For the record, I said this was a fraud and an attempted deep state coup on day one.

It couldn’t have been more obvious. I remember back in 2016 watching hacks on CNN cite Trump publicly telling Russia to try and release Clinton’s “30,000 emails that are missing” as though that was evidence enough.

They never had anything, but that doesn’t mean they can’t just make “crimes” up out of thin air.
Just a few months ago, former FBI director James Comey went on MSNBC and laughed about “getting away with” entrapping Michael Flynn:

Look at what they’re doing to Roger Stone and what they did to George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates and Michael Cohen.

The main question I have is whether Mueller chose not to indict Trump simply because he has fallen in line with the establishment and scrapped the whole “America First” agenda he ran on. There’s no reason to indict him if he no longer poses a threat to the establishment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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MAXINE MELTDOWN: ‘THIS IS NOT THE END OF ANYTHING!’

MAXINE MELTDOWN: ‘This is not the end of anything!’

“This is the— well, it’s the end of the report and the investigation by Mueller. But those of us who chair these committees have a responsibility to continue with our oversight.”

Maxine Waters still believes the “Kremlin Klan” won the White House for President Trump, despite the evidence indicating otherwise.

But no one can convince her that just because Special Counsel Robert Mueller found there was no collusion with Russia, that it’s over.

“This is not the end of anything!” Waters told MSNBC’s Joy Reid as they realized the report was a giant nothing burger for Democrats.

“This is the— well, it’s the end of the report and the investigation by Mueller. But those of us who chair these committees have a responsibility to continue with our oversight,” Waters said.

“There’s so much that, uh, needs to be, you know, taken a look at at this point,” she claimed,” and so it’s not the end of everything.”

Reuters reports:

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian meddling in the 2016 election did not find that any U.S. or Trump campaign officials knowingly conspired with Russia, according to details released on Sunday.

Attorney General William Barr sent a summary of conclusions from the report to congressional leaders and the media on Sunday afternoon. Mueller concluded his investigation on Friday after nearly two years, turning in a report to the top U.S. law enforcement officer.

Barr wrote to congressional leaders that “the investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense. Our determination was made without regard to, and is not based on, the constitutional considerations that surround the indictment and criminal prosecution of a sitting president,” according to the Daily Mail.

Democrats aren’t giving up.

House Intel Committee chairman Adam Schiff insisted on “This Week” that there is “significant evidence of collusion”.

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