If you scanned or watched any news reports on Friday and Saturday, you may have seen mention of a report by BuzzFeed reporter Rosie Gray on Friday that conservative blogger / consultant Josh Trevino received over $350,000 to shrill for the Malaysian Dictatorship.
Trevino also funnelled monies to other conservative bloggers, including Ben Domenech, in exchange ‘for favorable coverage’ of the regime [I think it was something rather different, but I'll address that in a moment].
Stacy McCain, being the consummate, old-school reporter he is, smelled a deeper story here and on Sunday he began reporting on it.
Stacy discovered that it wasn’t just Right Wing bloggers who were involved:
…But before the progressive Kossacks pile on the schadenfreude, they ought to recognize their own involvement in this operation….
Stacy quotes from a 2011 article by Ben Smith that names Leftist Jerome Armstrong as being part of the deal with the Dictatorship and then reports:
Wait, did he say “Jerome Armstrong”? Founder of the progressive blog MyDD, who in 2003 co-founded the political consulting firm Armstrong Zuniga with Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas Zuniga? The same Jerome Armstrong who co-authored with Markos the 2006 book, Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics?
Oh, yes, that Jerome Armstrong — the Internet hustler who once offered such various online services as financial advice and astrology readings as “Vis Numar” — was also part of of the “Malaysia Matters” dot-com triumvirate.
Do take the time to read the full report here.
Stacy filed another report later that evening [get out of the way when he's on the hunt]:
And here’s the big thing: There is reason to believe that Jerome Armstrong was involved with David All’s Malaysia P.R. operation before Trevino was brought in. When I shared that information with my online consulting source, he immediately speculated that Armstrong’s cut of the action must have been larger than the amount paid to Trevino. “That’s just how this s–t works,” my source said, i.e., the second guy brought in on the deal would normally be paid more than the third guy in.
But that’s just speculation, and so far neither David All nor Jerome Armstrong have said anything about what they were paid in the Malaysia P.R. deal. The only reason we know the details of Josh Trevino’s involvement is that Trevino filed his F.A.R.A. compliance form with the Justice Department and, so far as I’ve been able to learn, neither All nor Armstrong have filed a F.A.R.A. report.
Do take the time to read the full report here.
Yesterday, Stacy filed another report that provided more information on this growing controversial story, including how the Left is ignoring the involvement of it’s own, but that Leftist Rosie Gray is reporting on it.
A highlight:
…Gray’s account includes quotes from an e-mail Armstrong sent to Ben Smith in 2011, basically dismissing his work for the MalaysiaMatter.com site as an insignificant ”temp contract,” neither secretive nor sinister, but without saying how much he got paid for doing it. The fact that Treviño says he was advised by a lawyer that he was required to file a FARA report with DOJ, however, raises the question of whether Armstrong’s failure to register as a foreign agent was a violation of federal law.
Gray writes tersely: “Armstrong did not reply to repeated requests for comment.” Thus, the merchant of ”integrated communications solutions” is not communicating….
Do take the time to click here and read the rest of Stacy’s report.
In a report from this morning, Stacy offers evidence that one Thor Halvorssen is behind the revelations:
Thor Halvorssen is, so far as I can tell, not one of the bad guys, although I don’t remember ever hearing of him until Monday night, when I was on the phone with a MalaysiaGate source who said, “It’s this Thor Halvorssen guy who’s really pushing it.”
OK, you got my attention there, Mr. Source.
What had happened was that I’d said to my source what any experienced reporter knows about this story. To borrow a favorite saying of James Carville, “When you see a turtle on top of a fence post, you know it didn’t crawl up there by itself.”
Reporters don’t spend their workdays randomly scrolling through the Federal Agent Registration Act database to see if any bloggers are getting paid by foreign dictators. That’s not how a story like this gets reported. Journalists are just too damned lazy.
No, someone had to have tipped off BuzzFeed about this Malaysian pay-for-play operation….
Do take the time to click here and read the rest of this report and check out the Comments section, where some folks [including yours truly] have fleshed out some more information on an aspect of who Mr. Halvorssen is.
At the beginning of this post, I wrote:
Trevino also funnelled monies to other conservative bloggers, including Ben Domenech, in exchange ‘for favorable coverage’ of the regime [I
think it was something rather different, but I'll address that in a
moment].
That moment has arrived…
In his Sunday report, Stacy provided this quote from a 2010 article by Ben Domenech, one of the conservative writers who received monies from the Malaysian Dictatorship:
Yet one example of a call for moderate engagement that may prove quite profitable for our relationship with the Muslim world can be found in the Malaysian example. While on a trip to New York last month, during which he called for a “global movement of moderates” to retake the center of the international conversation, I asked Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak about the experience in his country.
“We have always taken the position that Islam is an integral part of public policy in Malaysia. By doing so, we have taken the wind from the sails of the extremists. There is no contradiction between being moderate and being Muslim,” Najib told me. “Being moderate, taking the middle path, is fundamental to Islam. It is one of the pillars of Islam. Muslims have rights, but it’s also enshrined in the teachings of Islam to safeguard non-Muslims in your midst. It’s wrong for Muslims to even be unkind to non-Muslims.”
One prominent example in recent months has been the jailing of two Muslims convicted of church arson during a series of religiously motivated attacks earlier this year. They were given five year jail sentences.
“We want to show that we are fair. If you desecrate a church, or a mosque, or a temple, the punishment is and should be the same,” Najib said.
What we see here is not simply ‘favorable coverage’ of the Malaysian Dictatorship, but another propaganda effort on the part of Muslims to deceive people into believing there is such a thing as ‘Moderate Islam’. There is not.
The Koran is very specific in what it demands of it’s adherents. One cannot be moderate in the service of Allah. He demands that Infidels be either enslaved or killed. And, since every word in the Koran is Allah’s word, none of his commands can be ignored. Any deviation is Heresy and that carries the death penalty.
What we have here in this story of bribed bloggers, therefore, is something worse.
These Useful Idiots and Dupes should be put in the same category as Grover Norquist: they are servants of Islam.
They are Dhimmi, modern Kapos serving Totalitarians who seek the utter and total destruction of The West.
