Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

The willow is too close to the house.

I really should read my own blog.

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

You can’t love your country only when you win.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Late Night Open Thread: Hard Out Here for Mar-A-Lago’s Premier Stenographer

Late Night Open Thread: Hard Out Here for Mar-A-Lago’s Premier Stenographer

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Late Night Open Thread: Hard Out Here for Mar-A-Lago's Premier Stenographer

Haberman knows her behavior is, at best, unethical… but who’s gonna pay her the big advance dollars if she gives up her hard-earned insider info for a reporter’s salary?

… For much of the past decade, reporting on Trump has been my full-time job as a correspondent for The New York Times. To fully reckon with Donald Trump, his presidency, and his political future, people need to know where he comes from. The New York from which Trump emerged was its own morass of corruption and dysfunction, stretching from seats of executive power to portions of the media to the real-estate industry in which his family found its wealth. The world of New York developers was filled with shady figures and rife with backbiting and financial knife fighting; engaging with them was often the cost of doing business. But Trump nevertheless stood out to the journalists covering him as particularly brazen…



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59Comments

  1. 1.

    Splitting Image

    The New York from which Drumpf emerged was its own morass of corruption and dysfunction, stretching from seats of executive power to portions of the media to the real-estate industry in which his family found its wealth.

    You don’t say.

  2. 2.

    piratedan

    so there was an ongoing crime… that she was aware of… with the perpetrator admitting his guilt and she said, you know, instead of informing the public, or submitting said article for publication or even… heavens forfend notifying said authorities… I’m gonna write a book instead.

     

    then wonder why in the hell there is so much distrust and disdain of their profession is a wonder… indeed it is.

  4. 4.

    prostratedragon

    And that crime is now at the center not just of a criminal investigation, but a national security one(*), yet she is not too ashamed to get out there and shill that book.

    (*)Though the 11 year old in that quoted tweet above seems to think it’s just a matter of making TFG lose an election.

  5. 5.

    ian

    I try not to wish ill or harm on anyone, so the most I can hope for is that wherever Haberman goes people will throw buckets of paint upon her.  I could even live with pies and rotten fruits.

    On a side note, I do wonder how we got to the point where the big book deal was more worthwhile to a reporter than a hot scoop.  Is this a recent press failing, or was it always like this and only now becoming a democracy threating occurrence

    Edit- this youtube clip seems relevant to the discussion.

  6. 6.

    Parfigliano

    Its a game to all of them.  Personal wealth, TV appearances and invites to the right parties are the prize.  They would kill their mom for a chance to even play the game.

  7. 7.

    Splitting Image

    @Parfigliano:

    On a side note, I do wonder how we got to the point where the big book deal was more worthwhile to a reporter than a hot scoop. Is this a recent press failing, or was it always like this and only now becoming a democracy threating occurrence

    Well, it used to be that the only way to get a big book deal was to come up with a hot scoop and make a name for yourself. Often several hot scoops.

    Haberman is, like many of her generation, a legacy hire. They enter the industry already having the connections they need to get the book deal. Bill Kristol was another. So was David Frum. Journalism becomes a sideline for people like that if they bother doing it at all.

  9. 9.

    Ruckus

    Many people will always put their own desires ahead of doing the right thing. I think it is somewhat rare that people will do the right thing for society rather than themselves. We are animals that have a survival instinct, although often it is not at all obvious that we can see what works best for said survival, especially if we believe that individual survival beats survival as a whole. In a modern world where a paycheck is rather important to reasonable survival rather than minimal survival, some are going to make their bank account an indication of their survival skills.

  10. 10.

    Hob

    I know the “What, would he have lost twice?” line has already gotten plenty of deserved derision and I don’t have anything clever to add, but still I will say holy fucking shit, Weisman, you asshole, what the fuck is wrong with you? What an incredibly snotty moronic attempt at… whatever he was attempting. As if nothing important happened in between the election and now. As if there weren’t a counterintelligence investigation going on right now to find out how much damage was done during all the time in between Lord Dampnut fucking off with his boxes to Mar-a-Lago and now. Does Weisman think this is funny; or is he really that stupid, or does he just think everyone else is that stupid?

  11. 11.

    Redshift

    On top of everything else wrong with it, the “would he have lost twice?” argument only makes any sense in a worldview where TFG losing means the bad thing is over and now things are back to normal.

    No, he couldn’t have lost twice, but if he’d been indicted in 2021, would we have fewer aspiring public officials thinking that following in his footsteps is the road to success? And more who don’t? Who knows, but it’s a definite possibility, and that’s just one way it matters.

  12. 12.

    Redshift

    @ian:

    On a side note, I do wonder how we got to the point where the big book deal was more worthwhile to a reporter than a hot scoop.

    I’m guessing Bob Woodward is the role model here, so it didn’t start recently.

  13. 13.

    eddie blake

    …or the public knowing a year ago that he was a grubby, spiteful, sticky-fingered little loser-thief instead of some glorious, golden leader might blunt some of this bullshit fascist wave of morons we’re dealing with, with some people just looking to the theft of natsec documents as the last straw, but having that disgust well up and build for fucking months.

    thanks, mags. way to fuck america on your way to cashing in.

  15. 15.

    David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch

    Somehow I get the feeling she and the FTFNYT would not have suppressed evidence of a Clinton committing a crime.

  16. 16.

    David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch

    If she had suppressed evidence of a Clinton confessing to a crime would the usual suspects defend her?

  17. 17.

    MobiusKlein

    Seems relevant to ask what other crimes Maggie has been covering up, complicit in delaying justice.

  18. 18.

    ColoradoGuy

    Just as it’s suspicious when the bank consistently makes errors in their favor, and never in yours, it’s suspicious these journalistic malpractices always favors the Republicans. Think of the years of legitimizing the lies cranked out by the Richard Mellon Scaife lie factory during the Nineties (leading to the Clinton impeachment), followed by Judith Miller repeating the WMD lies of the Neocons (leading to the Iraq War), and publicizing the lies of the “Clinton Cash” book in 2016. All of these “mistakes” favored the GOP and led to catastrophic consequences … hundreds of thousands dead in Iraq (for no reason at all), and hundreds of thousands dead in the pandemic. Those journalistic “mistakes” resulted in a hideous death toll, here and abroad. Does anyone at the NYT pay any price for being the Pravda of America? Of course not. The New York cocktail party circuit doesn’t care in the slightest.

  20. 20.

    Citizen Alan

    @Hob: I said this once before and people got mad, but I don’t care anymore. The only point of agreement I share with the average Trump supporter is in our shared conviction that most “journalists” deserve to end up in chain-link pens, cowering in terror as an angry mob screams for their blood.

  21. 21.

    Citizen Alan

    @Redshift: I’ve often wondered if Woodward regretted publishing the Watergate exposed in the Post. If he and Bernstein had kept tjeo9r findings to themselves, think of how much money they’d have made from the book about it they’d have published sometime in 1977.

  23. 23.

    CaseyL

    @Citizen Alan: Your comment didn’t anger me. I say much the same thing: “Trump had a point about the MSM, but for the wrong reasons.”

    I absolutely HATE the legacy and nepotism hires.  They have no concept of what journalism is supposed to be for, since they were given their jobs for their marquee value and connections.  Another freaking grift, in other words.

  25. 25.

    Aussie Sheila

    @ColoradoGuy:

    100%. I still can’t get over how little blow back on its rep the lies about wmd in the Iraq2 war, reaped. Everyone knew it was bs. From Australia to the world, everyone knew it was an illegal, unjust war.

    Yet among a certain set its rep for being credible continues. When you get every big call wrong, maybe there is a structural problem? 😒

  26. 26.

    livewyre

    @ColoradoGuy: I would go further than that. It’s not suspicious at all, but standard. Covering for power is a way to create value in society, albeit for certain narrow but prevalent definitions of value. What makes money must have something going for it. It’s like the broken window fallacy writ extra large; practically writ across the face of the moon.

    As long as our society values extracting the life out of wherever life can be found and accumulating it in the names of as few accounts as possible, there is literally no motivation for this to stop. It’s the norm. Every time we predicate ability to eat on honest toil, we uphold it.

    How to change this and stop equating “goods” with “good” on a systemic basis is left as an exercise for the reader. To others, I would hazard a guess that it doesn’t start with caging, humiliating, torturing, and slaughtering the hideous nonentities who are undeniably the source of all that plagues us. That’s been tried a few times.

  28. 28.

    Paul W.

    I don’t find what Haberman reports, or much of the NYT frequent by liners except maybe a Nate Cohn, to be of much or any value when I never can trust I am getting the full story. So I don’t think that she plays any positive role… in which case I’d rather have nothing than another Trump stenographer but here we are where they are all chasing the book model and claiming “who me” when Republicans get away with worse and worse crimes against the country.

  29. 29.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Ten Bears:

    This. Every time I catch her burbling on some yt news extract, knowing how close she must be to the inner sanctum of that vile mess that was your previous administration, the more disgusted with her, and the system that rewards her type I become.

    There is no doubt that US journalism at its best is top notch. Far better than the Murdoch infested mess that it is in Oz. But holey moley, US cable interviewers and their like are simply the worst in the world. They couldn’t interrogate a kitten.

  30. 30.

    Kathleen

    But Trump nevertheless stood out to the journalists covering him as particularly brazen…

    “Journalists” and “brazen” are interesting word choices.

  31. 31.

    Cathie from Canada

    Imagine what a difference it might have made if John Bolton and Haberman and Woodward and all the other reporters with inside information had spoken up during Trump’s first impeachment, instead of saving all their juicy stuff for their books.

    Because, as it turned out, a successful impeachment would have been a turning point in American history.

    Kicking Trump out of office in Jan 2020 would likely have saved thousands of American lives – a Pence administration would have appointed competent people to oversee government pandemic management, there would have been no Jan 6, no voter suppression in the states, its even possible that Pence wouldn’t have nominated a RBG replacement before the election so Roe v Wade would still be in effect.

  33. 33.

    🐾BillinGlendaleCA

    It is pretty bad that your local big box home improvement store(the orange one) has a stronger conflict of interest policy for it’s minimum wage employees than the FTFNYT.  The New York Times is garbage, I’ve heard that here.

  34. 34.

    steve g

    There is a word for that: misprision.

    “the deliberate concealment of one’s knowledge of a treasonable act or a felony.”

    “Misprision of felony” is a crime that occurs when someone knows a felony has been committed but fails to inform the authorities about it.

    18 U.S. Code § 4 – Misprision of felony

    Whoever, having knowledge of the actual commission of a felony cognizable by a court of the United States, conceals and does not as soon as possible make known the same to some judge or other person in civil or military authority under the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

    C’mon, Maggie.

  35. 35.

    Central Planning

    @Ian R: I’m trying to wrap my head around what the MAGAs would do if she were indicted. Friend of Trump AND lying media? How can both be true? Maybe they will self-destruct like Landru

  37. 37.

    Tony Jay

    Yeah, but if Access Maggie had spilled the beans on Trump back in 2021, or 2020, or 2019, or at any point when she had relevant beans and spilling them could have helped the national effort to restrain and remove a criminally corrupt traitor from the highest elected office in the land, you wouldn’t now be in a situation where his miasma of constant lies, threats and victimitude have remade the GOP in his image and elevated a generation of stone-cold fucking loons to the leadership of wide swathes of the country.

    You’d have cost the NYT all that drama! What kind of callous bastards are you that you’d deny the nation’s alpha caste of legacy hires such a succulent scenario to opinionate over and later write tell-all books about? It’s not their job to tell the country the truth about the GOP, it’s yours. Their job is to make their publishers happy and be rewarded lavishly for it. Why won’t you monsters just let them do their jobs in peace?

  39. 39.

    Brachiator

    The biggest NYT scandal of our lifetime – far worse than Judith Miller and Jayson Blair. Their reporter knew a year ago, and covered it up for a payday. Blame the paper. It’s the publisher’s disgraceful policy to allow this perfidy.

    It is insane that NY Times Editors and the publisher went along with this bullshit.

    And it is shameful that Haberman still gets to do interviews and appearances on the pundit shows.

    ETA. And it wasn’t Maggie alone. I can’t recall his name, but there is another NY Tmes reporter who covered the White House and who often shared a byline with Haberman, and who reported equally lame nonstories.

  41. 41.

    David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch

    Why would she ask him if he took any documents – that’s not a normal question.

    She only asked because she was told this was going on, yet she never reported the crime.

     

    I’m sure if people told her a NSA staffer named Reality Winner stole a document she wouldn’t have hesitated to call the FBI.

  43. 43.

    Geminid

    @Ten Bears: I can see why trump would say that to him, Haberman is like a “psychiatrist.” His idea of a good psychiatrist is someone who’ll kiss his fat ass.

  44. 44.

    lowtechcyclist

    I wonder if any U.S. citizen could sue her sorry ass for all the revenue she derives from this book.

    Standing? I’m a citizen of a nation whose security has been potentially had grave damage done to it by her failure to report this crime when she knew about it. I’ve got at least as much standing as that dipshit the GQP is using to sue the Administration over forgiving all the student loans.

    I wouldn’t do it myself, because my life is already too busy and complicated right now. But I’d love to see someone else sue her and her publisher for every dime they make from this fiasco. Since the damage was done to the nation and the citizenry as a whole, the money should go back to the treasury, rather than to the individual that sues, but dammit, someone should do it.

    Also, the FTFNYT won’t, because I’m sure their execs share the attitude that she has done nothing wrong, but they should fire her ass.

  49. 49.

    Another Scott

    All Maggie has to say is, “These are things that he told me.  I had no independent evidence that they were true, I’m not an investigative reporter and didn’t have the ability to assign others to find that evidence, so I didn’t report it.”

    Easy, peasy.  And her MSM reporter friends would support her even harder.

    She’s an important part of the system, but it’s a system.  Papers want embedded reporters so they play the game.  The game matters much, much more than informing the public or saving the country.

    FTFNYT.

    Grrr…,
    Scott.

  50. 50.

    Roger Moore

    “Nothing of great urgency, no.”

    Well, it’s clear why Maggie Haberman would be persuaded by the argument it’s OK to withhold information that isn’t of great urgency.

  51. 51.

    Roger Moore

    @Paul W.: ​
     

    I never can trust I am getting the full story.

    To me, this is the most important point. If NYT allows reporters to withhold this kind of information, what else are they not telling us? Of course discerning readers would have realized this a long time ago. I, at least, still remember back to 2004, when NYT decided not to run their story on warrantless wiretapping because it might affect the election.
    Free hint: if a story might be enough to sway the election, that’s evidence it is extremely newsworthy. If you refuse to run it for that reason, you have moved from reliable news source to propaganda.

  52. 52.

    MobiusKlein

    My wife is a total Halberman defender. She is plenty lefty, but sees value in what Maggie does, can’t see the conflict of interest.

    Maybe this discussion is too much ‘Inside Baseball’, and beside the core issue of tfg as traitor.

  53. 53.

    grumbles

    when we, the media, circle the wagons rather than show introspection it hurts trust and prevents us from learning

    Oh, this is painful. He’s so very close, right on the edge of understanding.

    “That’s the entire point of doing it, fool!”

  55. 55.

    WaterGirl

    @Redshift: Winning or losing is apparently all that matters.  Being elected = having power, not serving the people or having responsibility for thing that are bigger than yourself, your social circle, your benefactors.

  57. 57.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Another Scott:

    All Maggie has to say is, “These are things that he told me. I had no independent evidence that they were true, I’m not an investigative reporter and didn’t have the ability to assign others to find that evidence, so I didn’t report it.”

    Easy, peasy. And her MSM reporter friends would support her even harder.

    Except that when someone important says something of controversy, they’ll report it because (their attitude is) just the fact that s/he said it is news and we’ll report it.

    So “I’ve kept government documents, Trump claims” was a totally legit story by their usual standards.  Important if true, and newsworthy either way.

  59. 59.

    Tony G

    At a minimum she should be fired and then blacklisted from ever working at any other “mainstream” news organization again.  If she considers her savings to be insufficient to maintain her lifestyle, let her work for Breitbart, or she could stock shelves at Walmart.  Would knowing this and not reporting it to the authorities make her accessory to Trump’s criminal behavior?

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