AND THE THIRD ANGEL FOLLOWED THEM, SAYING WITH A LOUD VOICE, IF ANY MAN WORSHIP THE BEAST AND HIS IMAGE, AND RECEIVE HIS MARK IN HIS FOREHEAD, OR IN HIS HAND.
*** REVELATION 14:9
A new report claimed the Department of Justice might appoint a special prosecutor for a possible criminal grand conspiracy case as the investigation continues into former FBI Director James Comey and former CIA Director John Brennan.
FBI Director Kash Patel recently called the Russian collusion hoax "the biggest political criminal scheme ever perpetrated by portions of the FBI leadership and other elements of the intelligence community.”
Former FBI Special Agent in Charge Jody Weis said he "couldn’t be happier" the investigation into Comey and Brennan was launched.
Both Brennan and Comey are now under fire for allegedly making false statements to Congress about the investigation and the decision to examine claims in a Steele dossier from a former British spy. The dossier alleged coordination between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.
Four Texas Christian University football players were among 17 students arrested Wednesday in a campus drug bust, police said.
Police said those arrested were caught making "hand-to-hand" sales of marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy and prescription drugs to undercover officers.
"There is no doubt," TCU Police Chief Steve McGee said at a morning news conference following the arrests. He did not immediately identify the students.
McGee said the arrests came after a six-month investigation prompted by complaints from students, parents and others in the community. Police would not rule out more arrests, but said only people caught selling drugs had been arrested Wednesday.
School chancellor Victor Boschini called the students' actions "simply unacceptable."
Police said they had not determined whether any of the football players arrested were selling to other athletes. But Boschini suggested the four players' involvement was not a sign of a larger issue.
"I don't think it's a football problem," Boschini said.
A message seeking comment was left for TCU football spokesman Mark Cohen.
TCU is located in Fort Worth and has an enrollment of about 9,500 students. The Horned Frogs are set to join the Big 12 later this year in a move expected to be a boon for their athletic program.
Footage posted online last week by conservative activist James O'Keefe III captured NPR's chief fundraising official,Ron Schiller, disparaging conservatives and the Tea Party and saying NPR would be better off without federal funding.
Fueled in part by the attention given the video by the conservative Daily Caller website, an 11 1/2-minute version of O'Keefe's hidden camera video ricocheted around the blogosphere Tuesday.
It mortified NPR, which swiftly repudiated Schiller's remarks and in short order triggered his ouster along with that of his boss, NPR CEO Vivian Schiller, who is no relation to Ron Schiller.
A closer review of those tapes, however, shows that many of Ron Schiller's most provocative remarks were presented in a misleading way.
'There Are Two Ways To Lie'
O'Keefe's tapes show Ron Schiller and his deputy, Betsy Liley, at an upscale cafe in Georgetown for lunch in February. They meet with two men posing as officials with an Islamic trust. The men are actually O'Keefe's associates — citizen journalists, he calls them.
O'Keefe also posted a two-hour tape that he said was the "largely raw" audio and video from the incident so people can judge the credibility of his work.
The Blaze — a conservative news aggregation site set up by Fox News host Glenn Beck — first took a look late last week and found that O'Keefe had edited much of the shorter video in deceiving ways.
"There was certainly a lot there for conservatives and people of faith and Tea Party activists to be bothered about — but we felt like that wasn't the whole story," said Scott Baker, editor in chief of The Blaze. "There were a lot of other things said that may have been complimentary to conservatives and to people of faith and Tea Party activists in the same conversations."
My review was conducted with several colleagues. I also relied on outside people, including Baker, who have expertise in analyzing video and audio to review the two tapes.
Broadcast journalist Al Tompkins said he was initially outraged by what he heard in that first, shorter video by O'Keefe. Tompkins now teaches ethics at the Poynter Institute, a journalism school in St. Petersburg, Fla.
"What I saw was an executive at NPR expressing overtly political opinions that I was really uncomfortable with," Tompkins said. "Particularly the way the video was edited, it just seemed he was spouting off about practically everything."
But Tompkins said his mind was changed by watching that two-hour version.
"I tell my children there are two ways to lie," Tompkins said. "One is to tell me something that didn't happen, and the other is not to tell me something that did happen. I think they employed both techniques in this."
Sacramento, Calif.-based digital forensic consultant Mark Menz also reviewed both tapes at my request. He has done extensive video analyses for federal agencies and corporations.
"From my personal opinion, the short one is definitely edited in a form and fashion to lead you to a certain conclusion — you might say it's looking only at the dirty laundry," Menz said. He drew a distinction between that and a compressed news story.
O'Keefe's 'Investigative Reporting'
O'Keefe hasn't replied to several requests for comment for my stories on his tapes. On Twitter last week, he replied to me that his editing was no different from what other journalists do in crafting their stories — including my own.
On Sunday, he told CNN's Howard Kurtz that his use of hidden cameras is in the finest traditions of muckraking journalism.
"Journalists have been doing this for a long time," O'Keefe said. "It's a form of investigative reporting that you use to seek and find the truth."
O'Keefe said on CNN's Reliable Sources that his sting was inspired by NPR's decision to drop longtime news analyst Juan Williams last October after Williams made comments on Fox News about Muslims.
"The tape is very powerful," O'Keefe said. "The tape is very honest. The tape cuts to the core of who these people are."
But 26-year-old O'Keefe's own record is checkered. His takedown of the community organizing group ACORN relied on undercover videos that the California state attorney general's office concluded significantly distorted what occurred. Last May, O'Keefe pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor after an attempted video sting at the offices of U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA).
'A Big Warning Flag'
In the review of the NPR tapes, O'Keefe's edited video triggered criticism right from his introduction. He ominously describes the phony Islamic group, saying that its website "said the organization sought to spread the acceptance of sharia across the world." (Shariah is Islamic law based on the Quran, although there are wide disparities in how different Muslim sects and cultures interpret what that entails.)
On the tape, Ron Schiller is then shown and heard creased with laughter, saying, "Really, that's what they said?"
In reality, as the longer tape shows, that laughter follows an innocuous exchange as Schiller and Liley greet the two supposed donors at their table.
"That to us was a signal that they were trying to condition the person watching the piece to feel as though there was assent to these ideas," said Scott Baker of The Blaze. "That was a big warning flag."
Tompkins said O'Keefe sought to portray the fundraisers as though they would do anything to appease donors.
On the shorter tape, for instance, one of the fake donors is heard assailing a "Zionist" influence on the media — and Liley, NPR's senior director of institutional giving, is heard responding affirmingly.
The O'Keefe associate posing as potential donor Ibrahim Kassam says NPR is "one of the few places that has the courage to present it [fairly]. There's kind of a joke that we used to call it National Palestinian Radio."
Some laughter follows. But the shorter tape does not include Ron Schiller immediately telling the two men that donors cannot expect to influence news coverage.
"There is such a big firewall between funding and reporting: Reporters will not be swayed in any way, shape or form," Schiller says on that longer tape, in one of several such remarks.
Tompkins found that meaningful, noting that Ron Schiller was a fundraiser, not an official affecting the newsroom.
"The message that he said most often — I counted six times: He told these two people that he had never met before that you cannot buy coverage," Tompkins said. "He says it over and over and over again."
Confusing The Context
In addition, several times the donors seek to goad Schiller and Liley into making inflammatory statements about conservatives or Fox News personalities, and they deflect them. At one point, Liley explains that she attended Purdue University, which she describes as a conservative and respected research university, and that people there relied on Fox to get much of their news.
Menz, the digital forensics consultant, said he found some of Schiller's actual remarks disturbing. But by analyzing time stamps, Menz concluded that many of Schiller's remarks in that shorter video are presented out of sequence from the questions that were posed.
"For me, in my background, it immediately puts things into question," Menz said. "You really don't know what context these were in, what was going on in the 20 minutes before and after this question was asked."
Take the political remarks. Ron Schiller speaks of growing up as a Republican and admiring the party's fiscal conservatism. He says Republican politicians and evangelicals are becoming "fanatically" involved in people's lives.
But in the shorter tape, Schiller is also presented as saying the GOP has been "hijacked" by Tea Partyers and xenophobes.
In the longer tape, it's evident Schiller is not giving his own views but instead quoting two influential Republicans — one an ambassador, another a senior Republican donor. Schiller notably does not take issue with their conclusions — but they are not his own.
Fueling The Public Broadcasting Funding Debate
Upon their release last week, O'Keefe's videos gave fresh life to the push by Congressional Republicans to strip federal funding for public broadcasting. In the shorter video, Schiller appears to be saying that NPR would do just fine without federal dollars, though some stations would go dark. On the longer tape, it's clear Schiller says it would be disastrous in the short term.
Tompkins said O'Keefe's editing is repeatedly and blatantly unfair.
"Except for a couple of unfortunate forays for political opinion, I think that Ron Schiller actually did a fairly remarkably good job of explaining how NPR works and what you can and cannot expect if you contribute money to the NPR Foundation," Tompkins said.
Blaze editor Baker said he emerged from analyzing the tapes with a surprising degree of respect for the professionalism of the two NPR executives, Ron Schiller and Betsy Liley.
"I think if you look at two hours in total, you largely get an impression that these are pretty — they seem to be fairly balanced people, trying to do a fairly good job," Baker said.
In recent days, several influential journalists have written that they regret giving O'Keefe's NPR videos wider circulation without scrutinizing them for themselves, given his past record and some of the objections that the Blaze first raised. They include Ben Smith of Politico, James Poniewozik of Time magazine and Dave Weigel of Slate.
"The speed at which the media operates when a video comes out is a problem," Weigel said Sunday. "I mean, the rush to be the first to report on a video — and, let's be brutally honest, the rush is to get traffic and to get people booked on [cable TV] shows to talk about it — and that nature leads you to not do the rigor and fact-checking that you would do in other situations."
An Accelerated Departure
Late Sunday night, NPR Senior Vice PresidentDana Davis Rehm wrote in an e-mail that the videos unfairly present several innocent comments by Ron Schiller and Liley as inappropriate.
"No one should be surprised based on O'Keefe's record that the video was heavily edited with the intention of discrediting NPR,"Rehm said.
But from the outset, Rehm wrote, NPR confirmed that "egregious comments were made that were not distorted, doctored or fundamentally misrepresented."Ron Schiller had already announced in early March that he would be leaving NPR for a job at the Aspen Institute in his hometown in Colorado. He had been commuting across the country, at his own expense, since joining NPR 18 months ago. But in the wake of the backlash to the videos, his departure was accelerated to take effect immediately. And then the Aspen Institute announced Schiller would not be joining its ranks. Liley has been placed on administrative leave.
Neither has commented — save for Ron Schiller's apologies for some of his political comments on the day the story broke last week.
Stephen Voss NPR's Board of Directors accepted Vivian Schiller's resignation.
(5:25 p.m. ET: This post has been given an end-of-day write-through and re-ordering. After the following introduction, it lays out our updates in chronological order.)
Vivian Schiller, NPR's CEO and president since January 2009, left that job today in the wake of the second high-profile controversy to hit the organization in the past six months.
Dave Edwards, chairman of NPR's board, said directors came to the conclusion that the controversies under Schiller's watch had become such a distraction that she could no longer effectively lead the organization. She had told the directors that they should take the action they felt was appropriate, and Edwards said the board decided it would be best for her to depart.
The controversies in recent months that led to Schiller's departure have given NPR's critics opportunities to accuse it of liberal bias and to push for elimination of any federal funding for public broadcasting:
— Tuesday, a videotape surfaced of then-NPR fundraiser Ron Schiller (no relation) slamming conservatives and questioning whether NPR needs federal funding. His comments were secretly recorded by men posing as members of a Muslim organization (they were working with political activist James O'Keefe on a "sting").
— Last fall, NPR dismissed news analyst Juan Williams after he said on Fox News Channel (where he was also a paid contributor) that he gets nervous when he sees people in "Muslim garb" on an airplane. Williams went on to say it's wrong to profile or sterotype anyone based on their appearance, but NPR said it was the latest in a series of comments he had made that violated NPR's standards. The handling of his dismissal and the controversy surrounding it ultimately led to the resignation of NPR's top news executive at the time, Ellen Weiss.
We live-blogged today's developments. Here is how things happened and the news along the way:
NPR’s Diane RehmReacts to ALG’s Bill Wilson on CNN After Wilson Called NPR an ‘Elitist Soapbox’
Diane Rehm, the most neutral and objective person to weigh in on the NPR public funding situation, had this to say last night on John King’s America on CNN about Americans for Limited Government’s President Bill Wilson after Wilson called NPR an “elitist soapbox” (more below the video):
ALG President Bill Wilson’s statement from yesterday that Rehm disliked:
“NPR CEOVivian Schiller should have been forced to resign months ago after her outrageous firing of Juan Williams because he did not toe their orthodox liberal line. Her leaving now does not change the glaringly obvious fact that public broadcasting is nothing more than an expensive toy run by pseudo-intellectual snobs who despise the rest of us. Not one dime of taxpayer’s money should be spent to fund public broadcasting, which is nothing more than an elitist soapbox.”
A video made surreptitiously by a conservative sting artist shows phony, would-be Muslim donors meeting with two NPR fundraisers who are caught on the tape making candid, awkward comments about the Republican Party -- and also talking bluntly about the ouster of commentator Juan Williams.
Slate's David Weigel posted the video and a report on the incident. The sting operation, produced by conservative activist James O'Keefe, shows NPR fundraisers Ron Schiller (who has since left NPR) and Betsy Liley at lunch with two men masquerading as wealthy Muslim donors. That the NPR people appear to tell the supposed contributors what they want to hear is not an unusual approach for fundraisers.
But against the backdrop of a possible cut off of NPR funding proposed by the GOP-controlled U.S. House, Schiller can be heard saying that "very little of our funding comes from the government." That is correct. Then, talking about the GOP, he adds: "The current Republican Party, particularly the tea party, is fanatically involved in people's personal lives and very fundamental Christian -- and I wouldn't even call it Christian." In answer to a leading question about the tea party movement, he adds, "Basically, they believe in white, middle America, gun toting -- it's pretty scary. They're seriously racist..."
Schiller, who has left his job as NPR Foundation's senior vice president for development, goes on to say that he is proud that NPR let Juan Williams go last year after Williams said on Fox News he would be concerned if he boarded a plane with fellow passengers in Muslim garb. "He lost all credibility and that breaks your ethics as a journalist." Schiller says.
NPR, in a statement, said: "The fraudulent organization represented in the video repeatedly pressed us to accept a $5 million check, with no strings attached, which we repeatedly refused to accept. We are appalled by the comments made by Ron Schiller in the video, which are contrary to what NPR stands for. Mr. Schiller announced last week he is leaving NPR for another job."
O'Keefe's Project Veritas gained notoriety in 2009 in another covertly made video that showed individuals posing as a pimp and prostitute seeming to get advice on gaming the tax system from a representative of ACORN, a liberal community activist organization. O'Keefe want too far last year when he and three others were charged with attempting to tamper with the phone lines in Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu's New Orleans office. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, received three years' probation, a $1,500 fine and 100 hours of community service.
