I fully buy Smith committed suicide because of ailing health…but it definitely makes his WSJ interview seem more like a confession.
— On Trial for ??? (@ZeddRebel) July 13, 2017
Cheryl posted some days ago about the sudden death of Peter W. Smith, GOP political operative. There’s been an update:
… In a room at a Rochester hotel used almost exclusively by Mayo Clinic patients and relatives, Peter W. Smith, 81, left a carefully prepared file of documents, which includes a statement police called a suicide note in which he said he was in ill health and a life insurance policy was expiring.
Days earlier, the financier from suburban Lake Forest gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal about his quest, and it published stories about his efforts beginning in late June. The Journal also reported it had seen emails written by Smith showing his team considered retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, then a top adviser to Republican Donald Trump’s campaign, as an ally. Flynn briefly was President Trump’s national security adviser and resigned after it was determined he had failed to disclose contacts with Russia.
However, the Chicago Tribune obtained a Minnesota state death record filed in Olmsted County that says Smith committed suicide in a hotel near the Mayo Clinic at 1:17 p.m. on Sunday, May 14. He was found with a bag over his head with a source of helium attached. A medical examiner’s report gives the same account, without specifying the time, and a report from Rochester police further details his suicide.
In the note recovered by police, Smith apologized to authorities and said that “NO FOUL PLAY WHATSOEVER” was involved in his death. He wrote that he was taking his own life because of a “RECENT BAD TURN IN HEALTH SINCE JANUARY, 2017” and timing related “TO LIFE INSURANCE OF $5 MILLION EXPIRING.”…
Smith’s death occurred at the Aspen Suites in Rochester, records show. They list the cause of death as “asphyxiation due to displacement of oxygen in confined space with helium.”
Rochester Police Chief Roger Peterson on Wednesday called his manner of death “unusual,” but a funeral home worker said he’d seen it before…
Peter Smith wrote two blog posts dated the day before he was found dead. One challenged U.S. intelligence agency findings that Russia interfered with the 2016 election. Another post predicted: “As attention turns to international affairs, as it will shortly, the Russian interference story will die of its own weight.”
Breathing helium inside a plastic bag is the method recommended by the Final Exit Network. There are some things even the richest 81-year-old can’t buy, and time is among the foremost.
Montysano
Very Putin-esque, nyet?
SiubhanDuinne
@Montysano:
I am totally writing this Balloon Juice, how you say, comment, of own free volition and will.
ET
I hesitate to post this so early in a thread about a suicide even if the person is not necessarily someone I mourn (mostly cause I don’t know him) but there are some people OT there doing some really good trolling.
http://www.impeachthemotherfuckeralready.com
I would love to see a Member of Congress wearing some of this merchandise.
pamelabrown53
@SiubhanDuinne:
LOL. Creepy story. I thought that Life Insurance payment was denied in the case of suicide?
efgoldman
@Montysano:
I’d like to think that even mobbed-up Uncle Vladi wouldn’t violate the 50+ year convention of not going after each others’ leaders on their own soil. Like all the other kinds of mutually assured destruction, even the old Soviet leaders and the Dulles- era CIA wouldn’t go quite that far, outside of bad spy novels.
But her emails!!!
@pamelabrown53:
No. In general, there’s just period of time where it isn’t covered. After that point, many policies pay out on suicide.
efgoldman
@pamelabrown53:
Usually for a fixed period of years after the policy is written.
rikyrah
uh huh
UH HUH
LIPS PURSED
Major Major Major Major
This is all a distraction from arguing about whether Nancy Pelosi would be a better president than Hillary Clinton.
@SiubhanDuinne: is as American as pie from apples!
Gvg
I don’t get the life insurance expiring thing. I too thought it didn’t pay for suicide. File this under waiting for more info, don’t get it.
pamelabrown53
@But her emails!!!: @efgoldman:
Thanks. Learned something new tonight. Still a creepy story.
Honus
There’s a suicide exclusion in most life insurance policies. Typically, it expires two years after the policy is issued. So suicide is not excluded after that time.
sigaba
@Montysano: When Putin has someone killed he generally does it in a way that’s formally deniable but sends a clear message. This don’t seem like it.
Maybe it’s how Jared kills people?
replicnt6
@Gvg:
I think the idea is to prevent you from buying a life insurance policy and immediately committing suicide. If you commit suicide many years later, that wasn’t your purpose in buying the insurance.
Ian G.
I’m wondering when Kushner or Uday “commits suicide” by “shooting themselves” from 50 feet away with a ricin-tipped dart. Or with polonium in their coffee.
efgoldman
@Gvg:
“Term life” is just what it says: You pay for a fixed term; some go a year at a time, some can go a decade or more.
The suicide exclusion is per policy-specific. My first whole life policy, in my early 20s, had a two-year exclusion. It’s to prevent someone with a terminal disease, for instance, from killing her/himself off for an instant payout to the family.
It’s always all about the Benjamins.
The insurance company’s Benjamins, not yours.
TenguPhule
@efgoldman:
He’s already done it in the UK. And there are troubling suspicions he’s already doing it here.
And isn’t it interesting this guy’s health declined after 1/2017?
Wonder what they find at the autopsy?
Slow poison or radiation?
Ian G.
@ET:
Certainly a nice response to MAGA.
jl
Better get those Russian spy compounds open asap, so we can get to the bottom of it.
efgoldman
@Ian G.:
…in the back.
Hal
https://twitter.com/AdavNoti/status/885178296685744129
TenguPhule
So he died screaming like a little girl. Literally.
mai naem mobile
I just saw this on the Twitter machine. If roles were reversed Fox would be running 24/7 with how Hilz ordered Al Franken to take care of the killing of an old GOP gentleman in Minnesota. This story sounds a little too clean for me but whatevs.
TenguPhule
@efgoldman: Multiple times.
efgoldman
@TenguPhule:
The guy was 81, for christ’s sake.
People can get old really quickly, as I’ve been finding out, and I’m still in my early 70s.
There are enough real bullshit conspiracies happening without going to look for stuff, even for a ghoul like you.
Gin & Tonic
@TenguPhule:
Link to names of supposed victims, SVP.
rikyrah
Tired of Maddow being concerned about the quality of Dolt45’s lawyers. I don’t give a shyt about the quality of his lawyers.
Ian G.
@mai naem mobile:
I’m trying to imagine the FOX News response to Chelsea Clinton meeting with representatives of Iran who promised her dirt on Trump. I’m guessing they’d be demanding summary executions of every Democrat holding elected office, and concentration camps for all registered Dems.
TenguPhule
@Gin & Tonic: Judge Sheila Abdus-Salaam, Federal Prosecutor Beranton J. Whisenant Jr.
Died in America, but Russian: Vitaly Churkin. Sergei Krivov
UK victims are pretty infamous at this point, just google.
Miss Bianca
We’re living in an Ian Fleming knock-off kind of reality 24/7/365 now, tovarischii? Ho-kay…
Suddenly, spending a *lot* more time playing the fiddle makes sense. While
RomeWashington burns…But her emails!!!
@Gvg:
As noted above, most policies have a fixed term over which they won’t pay out on suicide. After that point, they do. The Insurers are mainly interested in preventing people from purchasing policies with the intent commit suicide. After that point, the base risk of suicide is just a factor in the price of the policy.
As for the insurance expiring. He probably has term life insurance. With term life insurance you and the insurer set on a fixed payment for a fixed number of years. If you die during that period, the insurance pays out. If you don’t, you get nothing. There’s often a clause for extending the policy beyond the agreed upon term, but usually at massively higher rates. The advantage to this type of policy over whole life insurance is that that payments are less.
Major Major Major Major
@efgoldman: he also might have been, you know, a touch mentally ill. Depression isn’t exactly rare in the elderly.
kindness
Funny but you know what happens when you cross the mob, right?
Hal
http://www.pajiba.com/politics/trumps-adult-children-ranked-from-least-to-most-awful.php
Keith P.
Someone needs to shoot a watermelon to make sure this guy really killed himself.
TenguPhule
@efgoldman: The best murders look like natural causes of death. That’s where we are now, because of who he was and what he did in can’t be ruled out without an autopsy.
sm*t cl*de
And you can record a final message in an increasingly squeaky high-pitched voice
ETA TenguPhule got there first.
Major Major Major Major
@TenguPhule: you’re practically salivating for this to be an assassination by a foreign power, it’s gross.
MomSense
@Miss Bianca:
I’ve been calling it LeCarre on Meth.
frosty
So when I read “Life insurance of $5 million expiring” it looks to me like he had a policy, it was going to expire before he died of natural causes, so he had nothing to lose by hurrying his fate along. If it paid out for suicide, as some have mentioned, so much the better.
ETA: But her emails!! explained it better upthread.
TenguPhule
@Major Major Major Major: I’m sure this was meant to reassure us.
Nothing to see here, absolutely nothing, no sir.
jl
It’s bad either way. Looks like other commenters are more than happy to cover the foul play angle.
If i was suicide, think about what that might mean. The devil-may-care attitude of the guy may have been a sad front.
He knew he was in very very deep legal shit, and couldn’t face it, whether he was sick or not.
Or he was in the middle of huge mess and expected thugs in very deep legal shit to lean on him.
And if his story were really all there was to it, why would that be?
Didn’t he claim to have come up empty? Was that true? We only have his word for it, don’t we?
How much of his story was true? How much was he spinning tales of futility in some attempt stay our of the storm?
Maybe I am not up to date on all the ins and outs of the sorry mess, but that is my take from what I know.
Edit: I think at least one person in UK was driven to suicide in the dirty dealings that lead up to Tony Blair taking his country on a crooked war.
Gravenstone
How many insurers pay out on a verified suicide? I can buy being despondent about a health setback, but the insurance should never have been a rational excuse.
TenguPhule
@Major Major Major Major: The article didn’t raise a single eyebrow of something odd going on with you? Really?
Baud
The guy probably felt guilty for running a child trafficking ring out of a pizza parlor. #ConspiracyWheel
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
Well, Pete, it appears you were wrong on that
Shana
@rikyrah: I think her point that he needs competent representation, for the good of the country, is a valid one.
jl
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: Was he try to whistle past some graveyard?
JMG
Writing a suicide note saying No Foul Play is both the sort of thing that arouses suspicion and the sort of thing a man who’d been working in the paranoid fringes of politics for decades might write because he never believed anything at face value in his adult life. My guess is the latter.
mai naem mobile
@Ian G.: there’s probably a thousand crazy instances of how Fox would have reacted if a Hilz administration had done x that the Dolt45 administration has done. This stuff would have been a Las Vegas style Buffet for Fox and that isn’t even considering that they would have had a reporter only following Bill to see if he was doing any skirt chasing.
Major Major Major Major
@TenguPhule: whether it did or not, it’s pretty obvious that you would be personally happiest if this were an assassination.
raven
My Right to Die
Assisted suicide, my family, and me.
KEVIN DRUM
Gravenstone
@TenguPhule: Doubtful. Asphyxia by simple oxygen displacement rarely causes the sense of choking that would cause the victim to panic and fight.
TenguPhule
@Major Major Major Major: You’re imputting motives to me that are only inside your head again. I’m not going to shed any tears for the SOB, but Russian Assassins on American soil is one of those, WTF moments, not a celebratory one.
Major Major Major Major
@raven: I hadn’t seen that article, thanks, I bookmarked it. This is an important issue to me.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@jl: He probably really believed it would just go away. It’s still early, but I doubt this is just going to fizzle any time soon. Assuming Trump doesn’t start WW3
Adam L Silverman
@mai naem mobile: Hannity isn’t on till 10 PM EDT. Give it fifteen minutes or so…
different-church-lady
Oh good, here come another ten thousand conspiracy theories…
Major Major Major Major
@TenguPhule: it’s just that people who would be unhappy about things tend to talk about them differently than you talk about this stuff.
Montysano
In post-Soviet Russia, suicide note writes you?
Adam L Silverman
@Keith P.: I’ll see if I can get to Publix before it closes at 10. I’m not going to the 24/7 Walmart grocery though if I don’t make it.
Keith P.
@Gravenstone: Several insurance policies will pay out on a suicide if the deceased has had the policy for X years.
Gravenstone
@Keith P.: Yeah, noted by multiples upthread. I posted that before reading the comments and ended with no edit window.
Archon
Say what you want about Ancient Rome or Fuedal Japan but discredited people in their societies committed suicide. In America, they get book deals or get elected President
Omnes Omnibus
OT, sort of: I just saw a trailer for Atomic Blonde. Does it make me a terribly shallow person that I am now looking forward to seeing it without knowing anything else about it?
raven
@Major Major Major Major: After what my family went through with my brother-in-law recently it’s become more important to me as well.
But her emails!!!
@Gravenstone:
My policy is fairly standard term life insurance. It pays out on suicide now that I’ve passed exclusion period. Total risk of death even including suicide is pretty low in younger cohorts where it ranks more highly as a cause of death. In older cohorts, the number of suicides increases, but it’s rank as a cause of death decreases. There’s not a strong reason to remove it from policies, insurers just have to avoid adverse selection which they do by using an exclusion period. Most people aren’t planning a suicide out 2 years in advance and if they’re already ill, the policy would be nearly unaffordable.
Miss Bianca
I have to admit I did snortle at the image of the squeaky-voiced suicide note. Yes, I already know I am a Bad Person.
Montysano
@Omnes Omnibus:
I’d listen to Lara Logan read the phone book, so….
Miss Bianca
@Omnes Omnibus:
Depends. How blonde was the Atomic Blonde?
Omnes Omnibus
@Montysano: That isn’t really an answer.
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: Charlize Theron beating the crap out of people for two hours. What more do you need to know?
Aleta
OT
(They had gone to Canada visit Mr. Wilwal’s sister for a couple of days. They’ve been living in the US 17 years, after coming as refugees from Somalia.)
Jeffro
What happens if you encase a watermelon in a helium-filled bag? Did anyone even THINK of that, hmm?
Omnes Omnibus
@Miss Bianca: In some of the scenes, she was a brunette. In others, she was platinum.
Montysano
@Omnes Omnibus:
Sorry. Totally not shallow, at least in the way I approach the world.
Adam L Silverman
@Miss Bianca:
Trailer 1 (redband/NSFW):
Trailer 2 (not redband, but plenty violent):
Trailer 3 (also not redband, but still plenty violent):
hueyplong
@Omnes Omnibus: On this particular point, you’re going to have to work to be more shallow than me.
pamelabrown53
@Adam L Silverman:
I saw the trailer for “Atomic Blonde” when I went to “Wonder Woman”. I thought it had a perverse appeal.
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman: OK, when you put it like that…yeah, no. Don’t even need to watch the trailers to say ‘no fucking way’ for this mouse.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Adam L Silverman: Please tell me how you embed YouTube videos
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman: Trailer 2 is the one that was on the TeeVee machine. Sounds like a decent soundtrack too.
Adam L Silverman
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: First you must sit at the foot of the wall on the summit of Si Lum for 8 years listening to the ants scream. Then…
Go to youtube. Below the video there will be an arrow pointing up to the right next to “share”. Click on it. The first field that comes up gives you the link. But if you click embed it gives you an embed code. Copy it, paste it into your comment, and hit return. Then hit post comment.
One caveat – it may only work for front pagers. And notMax complains it slows the page loading down, so I try not to overdue it.
Anne Laurie
@jl:
Occam’s razor: He was 81 years old and (if you read the linked article) his health had been failing recently.
Many of us over the age of, say, 50 can attest that there’s lots of chronic problems where you start a countdown clock in your head, waiting to see how much the technology will improve before you absolutely must replace that joint / get those cataracts removed / go on the expensive drugs / etc. Chronic heart patients frequently suffer from depression, as do older people in general.
I’m 61, and I haven’t done anything (that I know of) for which I might be called upon to expand vast resources of energy to stay out of jail. But I can totally understand an 81-year-old whose doctors have just told him that he’s not gonna live long enough to buy a new heart deciding that, fvck it, he’ll go on his own terms and save himself & his family the agony of a long-drawn-out ICU-chained decline.
Could it have been murder? Anything’s possible. But it’s a lot more plausible as suicide than the usual KGB-assisted ‘fell out of sixth-story window under interrogation’ or ‘accidentally drank polonium while in exile’.
? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?
@Adam L Silverman: That first part may be a little hard considering there is no such place =>
I thank you kind sir
frosty
@Adam L Silverman: Reminds me a bit of The Long Kiss Goodnight with Geena Davis, at least after her memory comes back. She kicked some butt in that one.
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman:
Never, ever, overdue it. Particularly not library books.
(ducking, running, hiding behind the couch)
dm
Sorry if this is a repeat, but: Donald Trump is wrong. When Democrats were offered secret help by the Soviets, they refused.
Omnes Omnibus
@Miss Bianca: You didn’t really just do that, did you?
Gravenstone
Just got back from the Youtube to see the very trailer. Interesting, maybe a rental. Had a nice detour to Blonde – Atomic, then Tina Guo – Wonder Woman as well as her work with Joe Bonamassa. Not a bad way to wind down the evening.
Study pantload, the emotionally unavailable unicorn
@Major Major Major Major:
I love it.
Anne Laurie
@Adam L Silverman: I’d watch it just for John Goodman (not that I don’t thoroughly enjoy Charlize Theron). But not with the Spousal Unit, he’s got a much lower threshold for movie violence than I do — not that he’s completely averse, but he’d have to know going in that, at the very least, the bad guys got what they deserved & that the narrative wasn’t just gore-porn.
Anne Laurie
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?:
Only front-pagers have that privilege, for reasons.
Think about it: Would you want to give the trolls free rein to dump Infowars porn or worse on every thread?
Omnes Omnibus
@Anne Laurie: Does E.D. Kain still have keys?
marv
I have friends, and I am not uncomfortable calling them friends – it’s where I live and they are my neighbors – who believe the Rapture is imminent and Hillary killed Vince Foster, maybe. They know my views. It would almost be disrespectful the next time I see them not to raise an eyebrow about this suicide.
SiubhanDuinne
@Omnes Omnibus:
No longer listed in the “Contact a Front-Pager” thingie. I’m not sure what, if anything, that says about keys allocation.
Adam L Silverman
@? ?? Goku (aka The Hope of the Universe) ? ?: Shaolin. Si Lum is a bad, direct transliteration of what we normally refer to as Shaolin. I just gave you the Bodhidharma’s spiritual biography.
Adam L Silverman
@Anne Laurie:
Adam L Silverman
@Miss Bianca: You want to wake up to another email like this morning’s?
sm*t cl*de
Nitrogen works just fine (or so I hear from a friend). Using helium is just showing off and using up a limited strategic resource.
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman:
And it ends up like a Dave Matthews Band song.
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: Art imitates life.
Kay
WTF does that mean? I have questions on why he’s so confident something will happen re: “international affairs” that will bury the Russia-owns-Trump story.
These people. Everything they say sounds hinky and vaguely threatening.
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman: And vice versa.
Brendancalling
No idea what the circumstances are behind the dude’s abrupt expiration, but a LOT of people connected to this Trump/Russia shit seem to have a habit of dying.
At this point, I’d believe anything. I’m waiting for Julian Assange to reveal himself as some kind of tucking cyborg.
Anne Laurie
@Omnes Omnibus:
Do us all a favor — do *NOT* contact him to find out, okay?
Omnes Omnibus
@Anne Laurie: Cool.
Anne Laurie
@Brendancalling:
He’s been very useful to Putin, for the last couple years.
What with all the news breaks, IMO his utility is just about at an end. Comrade Putin’s not big on leaving loose ends, da?
(Way I see it, Edward Snowden’s continued existence is clear evidence that he was an unwitting dupe, not a knowing collaborator. A cunning spymaster can always find another use for a high-profile dupe… )
ruemara
@Omnes Omnibus: I am thrilled to see it. So it puts you in excellent company.
Omnes Omnibus
@ruemara: Cool.
sunny raines
what a moron. scandals don’t “die of their own weight”. Increasing weightiness is exactly what keeps them going. Its lack of new “weighty” stuff, aka boredom that kills scandals.
Today’s republicans are the stupidest people on earth. its like some worm gets in their brains and eats the whole damn thing.
ruemara
@frosty: That movie kicked ass and deserved a trilogy. And Salt. I wanted a sequel so bad.
TenguPhule
@Major Major Major Major: I’m not really sure what it is, other then some odd circumstances which raise my eyebrows. So other then the relief that there is one less breathing Republican, not really feeling anything here.
Written medium doesn’t really convey emotions well unless I spend some effort on it.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
2