Roger Ailes Was One of the Worst Americans Ever

By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

20 May 17

n the Internet today you will find thousands, perhaps even millions, of people gloating about the death of elephantine Fox News founder Roger Ailes. The happy face emojis are getting a workout on Twitter, which is also bursting with biting one-liners.

When I mentioned to one of my relatives that I was writing about the death of Ailes, the response was, "Say that you hope he's reborn as a woman in Saudi Arabia."

Ailes has no one but his fast-stiffening self to blame for this treatment. He is on the short list of people most responsible for modern America's vicious and bloodthirsty character.

We are a hate-filled, paranoid, untrusting, book-dumb and bilious people whose chief source of recreation is slinging insults and threats at each other online, and we're that way in large part because of the hyper-divisive media environment he discovered.

Ailes was the Christopher Columbus of hate. When the former daytime TV executive and political strategist looked across the American continent, he saw money laying around in giant piles. He knew all that was needed to pick it up was a) the total abandonment of any sense of decency or civic duty in the news business, and b) the factory-like production of news stories that spoke to Americans' worst fantasies about each other.

Like many con artists, he reflexively targeted the elderly – "I created a TV network for people from 55 to dead," he told Joan Walsh – where he saw billions could be made mining terrifying storylines about the collapse of the simpler America such viewers remembered, correctly or (more often) incorrectly, from their childhoods.

In this sense, his Fox News broadcasts were just extended versions of the old "ring around the collar" ad – scare stories about contagion. Wisk was pitched as the cure for sweat stains creeping onto your crisp white collar; Fox was sold as the cure for atheists, feminists, terrorists and minorities crawling over your white picket fence.

Ailes launched Fox in 1996 with a confused, often amateurish slate of dumb programs cranked out by cut-rate and often very young staffers. The channel was initially most famous for its overt shallowness ("More News in Less Time" was one of its early slogans) and its Monty Python-style bloopers. But the main formula was always the political scare story, and Fox quickly learned to mix traditional sensationalist tropes like tabloid crime reporting with demonization of liberal villains like the Clintons.

Hillary Clinton in particular was a godsend for Fox. The first lady's mocking comments about refusing to stay home and bake cookies – to say nothing of the "I'm not sitting here, some little woman, saying 'Stand By Her Man' like Tammy Wynette" quote – were daggers to the hearts of graying middle Americans everywhere. What's the matter, Ailes' audiences wondered, with Tammy Wynette?

So they tuned into Fox, which made ripping Hillary and other such overeducated, cosmopolitan, family-values-hating Satans a core part of its programming.

But invective, like drugs or tobacco or any other addictive property, is a product of diminishing returns. You have to continually up the ante to get people coming back. So Ailes and Fox over the years graduated from simply hammering Democratic politicians to making increasingly outlandish claims about an ever-expanding list of enemies.

Soon the villains weren't just in Washington, but under every rock, behind every corner. Immigrants were spilling over the borders. Grades were being denuded in schools by liberal teachers. Marriage was being expanded to gays today, perhaps animals tomorrow. ACORN was secretly rigging vote totals.

Hollywood, a lost paradise Middle America remembered as a place where smooth-talking guys and gals smoked cigarettes, gazed into each others' eyes and glorified small-town life and the military, now became a sandbox for over-opinionated brats like Sean Penn, Matt Damon and Brangelina who used their fame to pal around with socialist dictators and lecture churchy old folks about their ignorance.

The Fox response was to hire an endless succession of blow-dried, shrieking dingbats like Laura Ingraham, author of Shut Up and Sing, who filled the daytime hours with rants about every conceivable cultural change being the product of an ongoing anti-American conspiracy. Ingraham even derided muffin tops as evidence of America's decaying values.

Ailes picked at all these scabs, and then when he ran out of real storylines to mine he invented some that didn't even exist. His Fox was instrumental in helping Donald Trump push the birther phenomenon into being, and elevated the practically nonexistent New Black Panthers to ISIS status, warning Republicans that these would-be multitudinous urban troublemakers were planning on bringing guns to the GOP convention.

The presidency of Donald Trump wouldn't have been possible had not Ailes raised a generation of viewers on these paranoid storylines. But the damage Ailes did wasn't limited to hardening and radicalizing conservative audiences.

Ailes grew out of the entertainment world – his first experience was in daytime variety TV via The Mike Douglas Show – but he later advised a series of Republican campaigns, from Ronald Reagan to George H.W. Bush to Trump.

So when he created Fox, he merged his expertise from those two worlds, mixing entertainment and political stagecraft.

The effect was to politicize the media, a characteristic of banana republics everywhere. When Ailes decided to cordon off Republican audiences and craft news programming targeted specifically to them, he began the process of atomizing the entire media landscape into political fiefdoms – Fox for the right, MSNBC for the left, etc.

Ailes trained Americans to shop for the news as a commodity. Not just on the right but across the political spectrum now, Americans have learned to view the news as a consumer product.

What most of us are buying when we tune in to this or that channel or read this or that newspaper is a reassuring take on the changes in the world that most frighten us. We buy the version of the world that pleases us and live in little bubbles where we get to nurse resentments all day long and no one ever tells us we're wrong about anything. Ailes invented those bubbles.

Moreover, Ailes built a financial empire waving images of the Clintons and the Obamas in front of scared conservatives. It's no surprise that a range of media companies are now raking in fortunes waving images of Donald Trump in front of terrified Democrats.

It's not that Trump isn't or shouldn't be frightening. But it's conspicuous that our media landscape is now a perfect Ailes-ian dystopia, cleaved into camps of captive audiences geeked up on terror and disgust. The more scared and hate-filled we are, the more advertising dollars come pouring in, on both sides.

Trump in many ways was a perfect Ailes product, merging as he did the properties of entertainment and news in a sociopathic programming package that, as CBS chief Les Moonves pointed out, was terrible for the country, but great for the bottom line.

And when Ailes died this morning, he left behind an America perfectly in his image, frightened out of its mind and pouring its money hand over fist into television companies, who are gleefully selling the unraveling of our political system as an entertainment product.

The extent to which we hate and fear each other now – that's not any one person's fault. But no one person was more at fault than Roger Ailes. He never had a soul to sell, so he sold ours. It may take 50 years or a century for us to recover. Even dictators rarely have that kind of impact. Enjoy the next life, you monster.

Trump or Congress Can Still Block Robert Mueller. I Know. I Wrote the Rules.

By Neal Katyal, The Washington Post

20 May 17

How politics could trip up the new special counsel

ppointing special counsel Robert Mueller to probe Russian meddling in the 2016 election (and any possible ties to President Trump’s campaign) was the only choice the Justice Department had. This is the best way to deal with the conflicts and potential conflicts of interest these matters posed. In fact, the special-counsel regulations under which Mueller was appointed were written precisely to address a situation like this one. I would know; I wrote them, in 1999.

But it’s also a highly imperfect solution, because it doesn’t foreclose the possibility of political interference in the investigation. The rules provide only so much protection: Congress, Trump and the Justice Department still have the power to stymie (or even terminate) Mueller’s inquiry.

The special-counsel regulations were drafted at a unique historical moment. We were approaching the end of President Bill Clinton’s second term, and no one knew who would be elected president the next year. Presidents of both parties had suffered through scandals and prosecutions under the Independent Counsel Act — Ronald Reagan with Iran-contra and Clinton with Monica Lewinsky. There was a chance to rethink things without either party fearing that it would give its political adversaries an advantage. Attorney General Janet Reno convened an internal working group to study the matter, and I ran that group for 18 months.

Our first decision was to let the Independent Counsel Act expire on June 30, 1999. Independence sounds good in theory, but in practice, it is mutually exclusive with accountability. The more independence you give a prosecutor, the less you make that prosecutor accountable to the public and regular checks and balances. And so we had seen the investigations and mandates of independent counsels mushroom, becoming a headless fourth branch of government. The consensus around this point was so great that sitting independent counsel Ken Starr testified against the act in 1999 and sought its expiration (his own investigation into Clinton, then still going on, was grandfathered).

At the same time, everyone understood the need for a prosecutor to take the reins when the Justice Department faced a conflict of interest or an appearance of impropriety. So we drafted the regulations with an eye toward that and convened many meetings with Hill staffers of both parties. Ultimately, Reno and then-Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder presented the regulations in congressional testimony. They received near-universal acclaim for striking a more proper balance.

Though our regulations were written nearly 20 years ago, they eerily anticipate the Russia investigation. Their very first lines refer to cases in which the attorney general is recused, as Jeff Sessions is now. They require the special counsel to be “a lawyer with a reputation for integrity and impartial decisionmaking,” which Mueller certainly is. They provide for the counsel to “not be subject to the day-to-day supervision of any official of the Department.” And they say that the acting attorney general (for the purposes of the Russia investigation, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein) can stop the special counsel “for any investigative or prosecutorial step” that is “so inappropriate or unwarranted under established Departmental practices that it should not be pursued.” If, however, Rosenstein invokes that authority, the regulations require him to notify the House and Senate Judiciary Committees. (In yet another foreshadowing of the present day, we assumed that the majority in Congress, if of the same party as the president, might be spineless and fail to investigate any interference by the Justice Department or the White House, and so we required the report to be given to the ranking minority member of each committee as well.)

This was the best we could do, given the United States’ constitutional structure. But there are still at least three ways in which Trump, Congress or high-ranking Justice Department officials could interfere with Mueller’s investigation.

First, most simply, Trump could order Mueller fired. Our Constitution gives the president the full prosecution power in Article II; accordingly, any federal prosecutor works ultimately for the president. That constitutional reality is not something we could write around with a regulation. Instead, we opted to try to focus accountability for any such activity. The regulations provide that Mueller can “be disciplined or removed from office only by the personal action of the Attorney General” (again, Rosenstein here, because Sessions is recused) and only for “good cause.” The president, therefore, would have to direct Rosenstein to fire Mueller — or, somewhat more extravagantly, Trump could order the special-counsel regulations repealed and then fire Mueller himself. Either of those actions was unthinkable to us back in 1999, for we understood that President Richard Nixon’s attempt in this regard ultimately led to his downfall. At the same time, after Trump’s firing of FBI Director James B. Comey this month, many things once thought beyond the realm of possibility look less so now.

Second, Congress could muck up Mueller’s investigation. Several congressional committees are looking into Russia, and any one of them could decide to give immunity to a particular witness. You’ve seen the drill before: Some high-ranking corporate executive comes before Congress and refuses to answer a question because it might incriminate her. The way Congress deals with that problem is to say that her testimony can’t be used against her. That’s part of Congress’s truth-seeking function. Formally, such immunity is confined to her congressional testimony and doesn’t prevent criminal charges altogether, again because the Constitution gives the president the prosecution power. But in the real world, if one of the committees gives immunity to, say, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, that could make Flynn’s prosecution impossible. Oliver North, for instance, was criminally convicted by an independent counsel during Iran-contra. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit threw out his conviction because Congress earlier gave him immunity for his testimony. Even though that immunity didn’t directly cover action by the independent counsel, the court found that the special prosecutor could have benefited from the fruits of that congressional testimony. There is a possible silver lining in this scenario, though: If Flynn was given immunity, he would have to testify, including against higher-ups, as he would no longer have any rights to refuse to testify to protect himself against self-incrimination. So even if Mueller can’t get Flynn, he might be able to convict someone else, including, potentially, a bigger fish.

Third, the regulations permit Rosenstein to define the scope and powers of the investigation. At the outset, the sweep looks fairly broad, encompassing “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump” and “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.” But that is not as broad as the authorities that were given in another recent independent investigation: In 2003, when Patrick Fitzgerald was appointed to investigate leaks that identified former CIA officer Valerie Plame, his appointment letters made clear that he was granted “all the authority of the Attorney General,” which was “plenary.” (You might have heard of the guy who signed the appointment letters giving Fitzgerald that plenary power. His name was James Comey.) Those sweeping powers could be given only to someone who was in the government and confirmed by the Senate — as Fitzgerald, then a sitting U.S. attorney, had been — so they are unavailable to Mueller. But they stand as a reminder that Mueller operates as a subordinate to the Justice Department, not as Rosenstein’s equal.

These vulnerabilities mean that Mueller’s probe is not entirely free of the political process — it is not sacrosanct. But it is still the best mechanism we have to find out what the public is clamoring to know.