As diaried earlier by Egberto Willies 35 year NSA intelligence officer Malcolm Nance demanded an apology from Breitbart editor Alex Marlow because his paper had done a report claiming that Nance had called for a terrorist attack on the Trump Tower in Turkey.
“I sort of have a bone to pick with you,” Nance asserted. “You’re at Breitbart, right? And you don’t do fake news, right? That’s what you’re asserting here? Yeah, you know there was this article about a 35-year counterterrorism expert who claimed that they wanted Trump Tower attacked that was written in Breitbart? I got thirty-one death threats from that – and that came from your website. Are you going to apologize to me? I’m sorry to say, I spent decades hunting terrorists. Yes, so that’s fake as hell.”
“You don’t have to share your bonafides with me,” Marlow replied. “I respect you. I respect your service.”
“But your followers threatened my family, my children, my wife,” Nance shot back.
…
“Show me the story,” Marlow offered. “And if the story is as you describe it, I’ll be happy to offer an apology.”
“I will come to your office to see that retraction,” Nance
Honestly the interest part is where Marlow tried to pretend that the real victims in the entire scenario — are Breitbart and conservatives.
The original story Nance is referring to was based, believe it or not, on a tweet that he later deleted.
In another extraordinary outburst, MSNBC “counter-terrorism analyst” Malcolm Nance called on the Islamic State to bomb a building owned by Donald Trump in the Turkish city of Istanbul.
Responding to a photo of a Trump property in Istanbul, Nance tweeted: “This is my nominee for the first ISIS suicide bombing of a Trump property.” He later deleted the tweet but has yet to issue an apology or explanation.
In the run-up to last year’s presidential election, Nance described Donald Trump as the “ISIS candidate,” and following his victory, predicted that Donald Trump’s security and military advisors would lead to “the end of U.S.-Middle East relations as it exists today.” He also questioned whether Trump’s victory meant America was “teetering on the edge of fascism.”
Let me just let Snopes deal with this nonsense.
On 18 April 2017, various right wing web sites (including Newsbusters and Breitbart) reported a claim that Malcolm Nance, a retired Navy intelligence officer, veteran counterterrorism expert and current MSNBC commentator, called for the Islamic State, or ISIS, to bomb property belonging to President Donald Trump.
...
We reached out to Nance, who did not respond to our request for comment; we then spoke to Chris Sampson, a cyberanalyst who co-authored several books with Nance, and has known him for a decade. Sampson said it is quite farfetched to claim that Nance, a 34-year veteran of the U.S. military’s counter-terrorism operations, would advocate a terrorist attack. “There’s no way my Cro-Magnon brain would have interpreted that to say he’s threatening somebody,” Sampson said.
Sampson added that Nance’s tweet was a “threat assessment” based on the fact that both President Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan are particularly resented by ISIS, and that both have recently been in the news together, making a location that both bears Trump’s name and is situated in Erdoğan’s country vulnerable. On 18 April 2017, the news media widely reported that President Trump had called to congratulate Erdoğan on a referendum election that granted him expanded powers. In June 2016, the Turkish president called for Trump’s name to be removed from a building owned by a Turkish conglomerate, because of the then-candidate’s derogatory comments about Muslims while on the campaign trail.
Basically Newsbusters and Breitbart decided to assume that Nance, who has fought against terrorist like ISIS for the last 3 decades would actually call for a terrorist attack simply because the target had a connection to Trump, rather than giving his professional assessment of what might be the next likely ISIS target. The Breitbart story never considered the possibility that Nance was issuing a warning that that location would be a high value target for ISIS, rather than the frankly loony idea that he was advocating for it to be attacked.
Sure it’s possible to take the worse possible negative interpretation of the tweet, which is exactly what Breitbart and Newsmax did, which is sloppy irresponsible journalism already but then Marlow spent quite a bit of time complaining about negative interpretations about the right and Breitbart by others.
Oh, so we can smear you, but don’t you dare think of us the worse possible light.
For example after saying Nance was a “hysterical person” Marlow took offense to the accusation made by Nance that one Brietbarter was a “Baby Geobbels”, complaining that they are also compared to Nazis, Fascists and Racists. But then again how credible is that after they had Milo — who was so racist on twitter he got banned for life — and also Katie McHugh and on their payroll…
How can they be surprised after Milo spends so much of Breitbart’s energy promoting people like Richard Spencer and things like this happen?
While at Breitbart Steve Bannon said they are the platform of the Alt-RIght.
Then there's the line on the resume drawing all the controversy: Bannon's time as executive chairman of Breitbart, turning the right-wing news site into the platform of the so-called alt-right, as he once told Mother Jones magazine.
That online community coalesced around the conviction that the Republican Party and establishment conservatives have turned their backs on a vision of America deeply influenced by nationalist thought, some of which is overtly racist. Certain alt-right adherents have unleashed a wave of anti-Semitic, racist and misogynist vitriol online against supporters of Trump's rival Republicans, Clinton voters and journalists during this campaign.
So Marlow is all put out that people are saying Brietbart is like Nazis, fascists and racists except for the fact they keep associating with and directly promoting Nazis, fascists and Racists. And when Nance talks about the death threats he received as a result of their story, they respond with “Oh, we get threats too”
Yeah, ok, so it’s not like Breitbart ever promoted some other false story that led to a violent incident.
On 4 November 2016, Reddit user u/DumbScribblyUnctious published a thread titled “Comet Ping Pong – Pizzagate Summary” to subreddit r/The_Donald (a community of Donald Trump supporters), which appears to have touched off a complex and detailed conspiracy theory involving WikiLeaks’ release of e-mails from former Hillary Clinton presidential campaign chair John Podesta, child exploitation, and a Washington, D.C., pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong.
A theory which was promoted by a Breitbart tweet.
This is the “pity poor us” victim game that the Alt-Right plays. And on top of Marlow we now have this ridiculous bullshit from ex-James O’Keefe Project Veritas worker Laura Loomer who jumped on stage during a performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Ceasar claiming that it promoted “violence against the right” because the actor playing Ceasar who is assassinated during the play, bares a strong resemblance to Trump.
Loomer: I really think that the left really wants there to be another civil war in this country. They’re so polarizing and their so violent. They’re so disgusting and they lack morals. And they really want there to be an assassination, so they can have not only a full blown race war, but they want there to be political wars. Violent, violent wars, a civil war because they are refusing to accept the fact that Donald Trump is our President. Just today you had Refuse Fascism and member so ANTIFA standing out here outside the theater with their signs talking about how much they hate Trump, but I’m not allowed to go over here and speak about what is right, condemning violence against the right.
[Then the cops show up]
Loomer: Well i guess I’m being arrested.
Cop: Yeah, you can’t jump up on stage here. .. Put your palms together.
Loomer: I’m not resisting, unlike the Left I’m not Resisting. … I just find it incredible that somebody can actually stab something that looks exactly like Donald Trump, and they’re pretty much promoting an assassination attempt, people are really crazy, there have been bomb threats at Trump Tower, there’s been over 12,000 tweets on twitter calling for Trump’s assassination.
This play was written in 1599, I don’t think they had Trump in mind at time. Also the bit about 12,000 tweets calling for Trump’s assassination — is a Breitbart story.
Yeah, but they didn’t report this.
Earlier today, self-described conservative blogger Solomon "Solly" Forell posted a tweet that included a call for assassination, as well as this line: "We'll surely get over a bullet 2 Barack Obama's head!" It gets worse:
Or report how death threats surged against Obama in general, but they actually kept a lot of it under wraps for good reasons.
Since the President took office in 2008, the rate of threats against the president has increased 400% cent. Some threats to the President have been publicized, including the well known alleged plot by white supremacists in Tennessee to rob a gun store, shoot 88 black people, decapitate another 14 and then assassinate the first black president in American history.
Most however, are kept under wraps because the Secret Service fears that revealing details of them would only increase the number of copycat attempts.
So why could it be that Breitbart (and also Newsmax and Infowars) are hyping the number of threats Trump gets on twitter? Could it be so they can complain about it.
Not that surprisingly we didn’t see this person jump up on stage to protest the guy who showed up on Comet Ping Pong with a gun, or defend Kathy Griffin for the Death Threats she getting now or when they did the same play in 2012 with an assassinated “Ceasar” that looked like Barack Obama. We didn’t Breitbart crying for “civility” when Trump was calling Hillary Clinton a murderer over Vince Foster.
When asked in an interview last week about the Foster case, Trump dealt with it as he has with many edgy topics—raising doubts about the official version of events even as he says he does not plan to talk about it on the campaign trail.
He called theories of possible foul play “very serious” and the circumstances of Foster’s death “very fishy.”
“He had intimate knowledge of what was going on,” Trump said, speaking of Foster’s relationship with the Clintons at the time. “He knew everything that was going on, and then all of a sudden he committed suicide.”
And also this.
Trump described it as Clinton’s “far-reaching criminal conduct” and “equally far-reaching coverup.”
“She got away with murder, honestly,” he said. “She has no right to be running, you know that. But … if she were to win, it would create an unprecedented constitutional crisis that would cripple the operations of our government.”
It’s not like Breitbart ever published an accusation like that.
Oh wait.
Friday at the 2015 Southern Republican Leadership Conference in Oklahoma, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under President George W. Bush, John Bolton, said former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is “responsible for the tragedy of the murder of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans,” in the 2012 terror attack in Benghazi Libya.
Bolton said, “I think the most telling information that we have seen in this limited number of emails is that there are repeated examples of Secretary of State Clinton being told in 2011 and 2012 that the security situation of our personnel in Tripoli and Benghazi was very precarious. The country’s government had fallen apart—that the threat from terrorist attacks was high and that our people were very concerned about it.”
And it’s not like they have pattern of this kind thing. Er, whoops.
GOP establishment consultant Rick Wilson, one of the most vile “Never Trumpers” who once said the donor class should “put a bullet in” Donald Trump, thinks supporters of President Trump saw the assassination attempt on House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) as a “blessing.”
“A lot of clickservatives saw yesterday as a grim blessing,” Wilson tweeted the morning after a gunman who hated Trump and Republicans opened fire on Republicans who were practicing for the Congressional Baseball Game
…
During the 2016 election cycle, Wilson, who constantly bemoans what he deems is crass behavior by anyone who is not a fellow “Never Trumper,” went on national television and said the donor class needed to “put a bullet in Donald Trump.”
“They’re still going to have to go out and put a bullet in Donald Trump,” Wilson told MSNBC’s left-wing audience. “And that’s a fact.”
Wilson actually said that in October of 2015 a year and a half before the election so it’s clearly not about an attack literally attack against the current President. He was just talking about the donor class pulling their funding from him. Odd that Breitbart decided to pull out this almost 2 year-old chestnut for a fresh drive about the bot webs today, isn’t it?
Hulk Hogan sued Gawker and won $31 Million over a sex tape, that was real. Alfa Bank has sued Buzzfeed for having posted the Steele Dossier online. Melania Trump has sued the Daily Mail for $150 Million arguing they damaged her reputation by reporting that she may have worked as an “elite escort.”
Considering the fact that this Breitbart report generated clear threats against Nance and his family, in the same way that the Comet Ping Pong story led to a violent confrontation, it should be considered that Breitbart deliberately slanted their story against Nance with actual malice of forethought because of his criticism of Trump.
In personal injury law, defamation occurs when someone publishes a false statement that ends up harming the injured person’s reputation, resulting in damages. To prove that defamation occurred, the plaintiff in a defamation case must prove all of the following:
- The defendant made a statement (spoken or written);
- The statement was false;
- The defendant published the statement by speaking it or sending it in writing to a third person; and
- The publication of the false statement injured the plaintiff’s reputation, making the plaintiff entitled to damages.
Injured plaintiffs who are private citizens only have to prove the four elements listed above. An injured plaintiff who is a “public figure,” however, has to prove these four elements plus one more: that the defendant published the statement with “actual malice.”
If Hogan can sue for $31 Million and Melania can sue for $150 Million in damages over a false story that frankly hardly anyone even read, perhaps the one way to get these fake news sites from peddling their phony wares is to make them pay for it in cash, painfully.