Fearless, Adversarial Journalism – Spoken Edition

“The FBI has become America’s secret police.” Gregg Jarrett was just getting started. It was December 6, and the Fox News legal analyst was a guest on Sean Hannity’s show. They were kicking off what would become the newest right-wing talking points about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. “Secret surveillance, wiretapping, intimidation, harassment, and threats,” Jarrett continued.

Washington is all abuzz with rumors about the fate of Robert Mueller, the special counsel appointed to examine “any links and/or coordination” between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign. According to some reporting, Donald Trump’s allies believe he will have a “meltdown” and try to fire Mueller ifthe special counseldoes not quickly wrap up the investigation and exonerate the president.

The “fake news media” has been prosecuted throughout 2017 in the kangaroo court that is President Donald Trump’s Twitter account, but in a courtroom in Washington, D.C., the definition of journalism itself is on trial. The answer to the question will decide the fate of one of six people currently on trial for their proximity to the protests thattook place around Trump’s inauguration on January 20.

Abu Fahed, a Syrian rebel and resident of the district of Eastern Ghouta, was on his way home from work a few weeks ago when he lost five members of his family. He had been building hillforts in Jobar, part of the effort to keep Eastern Ghouta, a hotly contested area on the outskirts of Damascus, in rebel hands. He stopped in at his sister’s home on his way back to the town of Kafr Batna, where he lives. That’s when Abu Fahed heard aircraft attacks in the area.

Surrounded by Israeli settlers, checkpoints, and empty streets closed by the military, human rights activist Issa Amro spent his first day out of jail at home, in campaign mode and planning his next moves to resist Israel’s occupation of his city.

It’s been a bleak year for the 194 protestors, medics, and journalists facing multiple felony charges stemming from their arrest surrounding Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration on January 20, 2017. Vilified by much of the mainstream press and largely ignored by the liberal “Resistance” movement, the J20 defendants — as they’re collectively known — have huddled around each other and their tight network of supporters.

When Matt Lauer was fired from the “Today” show after allegations of sexual misconduct, news reports alleged that his lawyers were working on a plan to get the disgraced host a $30 million payout from NBC — the remainder of his $20 million a year salary up until the end of 2018. For a vastly wealthy serial harasser to believe he is owed tens of millions more dollars seemed a galling manifestation of the very entitlement underpinning the predatory behavior for which he was fired.

Zahr Said didn’t think much about her inability to check in online for her flight home to Seattle after an October business trip in Beijing. She also didn’t worry too much about being twice singled out for additional screening before boarding her flight and again at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection checkpoint at Seattle International Airport.

The war in Yemen took an unexpected turn last week when the country’s former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, was assassinated by a Houthi rebel militia at his home in the capital, Sanaa. Until early December, Saleh and the Houthis, an Iranian-backed group that controls Sanaa and much of northern Yemen, had been allies.

Hurricane Maria may have devastated Puerto Rico from one end of the island to the other, but now a new force is set to be unleashed upon it: the Republican tax plan. A small provision in the House version of the tax bill aimed at boosting American industry would — perhaps unintentionally — devastate Puerto Rico’s economy. That part of the bill, Section 4303, is ostensibly aimed at keeping U.S. profits on U.S. shores. Under its current arrangement with the IRS, certain kinds of U.S.

The hostel in Tapachula looked at first like any other border town flophouse. Dark back rooms with naked mattresses. Dust unspooling in the sunlit lobby. A bird cage under a dirty towel. A few tenants hung out over smartphones, skin slick in the thick air of southernmost Mexico. Then a young woman in a black hijab passed through. “Salam alaikum,” she said, exchanging greetings with a Somali student who’d folded himself onto a small bench in the lobby.

One night inmid-August 2015, a fleet of warplanes circled over the Yemeni port city of Hodeida. Since that spring, a Saudi-led coalition had been carrying out a devastating bombing campaign. The United States had been helping the coalition with targeting, arguing that its precision guidance of airstrikes would mitigate civilian casualties. But that night, the coalition raid leveled the port, destroying four massive cranes that were essential for unloading cargo ships.

As law enforcement officers advanced in a U-shaped sweep line down North Dakota Highway 1806 last October, pushing back Dakota Access opponents from a camp in the pipeline’s path, two sheriff’s deputies broke formation to tackle a 37-year-old Oglala Sioux woman named Red Fawn Fallis. As Fallis struggled under the weight of her arresting officers, who were attempting to put her in handcuffs, three gunshots allegedly went off alongside her.

Did the Trump campaign collude with Vladimir Putin to win the 2016 election? Maybe. We await Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s next move to learn more about that. But in the meantime, why aren’t more members of Congress or the media discussing the Trump transition team’s pretty brazen collusion with IsraeliPrime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to undermine both U.S.

Friday was one of the most embarrassing days for the U.S. media in quitea long time. The humiliation orgy waskicked off by CNN, withMSNBC and CBS close behind,with countless pundits, commentators and operatives joining the party throughout the day.