Government & Communications

Fight for the Future sees dead people. At least it says a few have somehow filed anti-Title II comments to the Federal Communications Commission according to reports from the deceased's friends.

The group has also found another dozen or so people—twice the original number—who say anti-Title II comments were filed in the FCC docket under their names that they did not submit. In addition, the group said it has been hearing from people saying that a comment was filed under the name and address of a deceased family member. The group claims that over 450,000 fake comments have been submitted and that the FCC "is still refusing to remove fake comments, even when victims call the FCC directly and demand that their name and personal information be removed from a public docket endorsing political messages they don’t agree with." Fight for the Future also said it had received three reports from friends of recently deceased individuals whose names were on comments, saying the comments would have had to be posted posthumously.

Michael Dubke, the White House communications director, announced that he was resigning, as President Donald Trump weighs a broader shake-up of his staff in the face of multiple investigations.

Dubke, a veteran Republican strategist who served three months in the role, said that he offered his resignation on May 18 and agreed to stay on until President Trump completed his first overseas trip, which ended over the weekend. Other staff changes could come by the end of the week, White House officials said.

The resignation came as President Trump and his team pushed back against reports that Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser, explored the possibility of setting up a secret communications channel to Moscow during the transition between the election and inauguration. President Trump posted a link on Twitter to a “Fox & Friends” article reporting that the Russians, not Kushner, suggested the secret channel and that it was meant as a one-time vehicle to talk about the civil war in Syria. Trump’s tweet came shortly after his counselor, Kellyanne Conway, went on the same program to call the talk of collusion with Russia “just a rush to judgment” and to repeat the president’s support for his son-in-law.

As his city mourns two men who were killed after confronting a man screaming anti-Muslim slurs, Mayor Ted Wheeler (D) is calling on federal officials to block what he called “alt-right demonstrations” from happening in downtown Portland (OR). His concern is that the two rallies, both scheduled in June, will escalate an already volatile situation in Portland by peddling “a message of hatred and of bigotry.” Although the organizers of the rallies have a constitutional right to speak, “hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment,” said Mayor Wheeler. But history and precedent are not on Wheeler's side. The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that hate speech, no matter how bigoted or offensive, is free speech.

President Donald Trump returned home on Saturday to confront a growing political and legal threat, as his top aides tried to contain the fallout from reports that his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is a focus of investigations into possible collusion between Russia and the president’s campaign and transition teams. The White House canceled a presidential trip to Iowa and was putting together a damage-control plan to expand the president’s legal team, reorganize his communications staff and wall off a scandal that has jeopardized his agenda and now threatens to engulf his family.

Behind the scenes, Trump’s advisers were working to create a crisis-control communications operation within the White House to separate the Russia investigations and related scandals from the administration’s day-to-day themes and the work of governing. The goal is to give President Trump more outlets for communicating his message in an unvarnished way, while curbing opportunities for aides to be confronted publicly with damaging developments or unflattering story lines. Under the evolving scenario, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, would take a diminished public role, with daily on-camera briefings replaced by more limited interactions with journalists, while President Trump would seize more opportunities to communicate directly with his core supporters through campaign rallies, social media appearances such as Facebook Live videos, and interviews with friendly news organizations.

Facebook, Google, Microsoft and a host of tech companies asked Congress to reform a government surveillance program that allows the National Security Agency to collect emails and other digital communications of foreigners outside the United States.

The requests came in the form of a letter to House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), who is overseeing the debate in the House of Representatives to reauthorize a program, known as Section 702, which will expire at the end of the year without action by Capitol Hill. In their note, the tech companies asked lawmakers for a number of changes to the law particularly to ensure that Americans’ data isn’t swept up in the fray. Meanwhile, they endorsed the need for new transparency measures, including the ability to share with their customers more information about the government surveillance requests they receive. Signing the note are companies like Airbnb, Amazon, Cisco, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Lyft, Microsoft and Uber. Absent, however, is Apple.

[Commentary] For Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai, fabricating a network neutrality counter-narrative means making things up  while burying mounting evidence that the 2015 rules are working well. It’s all part of Pai’s ongoing efforts to keep people in the dark as he tries to strip away the open-internet protections that millions upon millions of internet users demand.

As the Trump FCC moves forward with this misinformation campaign, it’s worth highlighting the six things its chairman doesn’t want you to know:

• ONE: The American Public Overwhelmingly Supports Net Neutrality Protections
• TWO: The 2015 FCC Rules Are Working
• THREE: Net Neutrality Supporters Aren’t Crazy
• FOUR: Without Net Neutrality Protections, ISPs Will Wreak Havoc on the Internet
• FIVE: Net Neutrality Is Not Government Regulation of the Internet
• SIX: Pai and His Industry Allies Don’t Support the Open Internet

[Karr is Senior Director of Strategy at Free Press]

[Commentary] Montana GOP congressional candidate Greg Gianforte said of a Guardian reporter, “The last guy did the same damn thing.” From the looks of things, “the same damn thing” appears to boil down to asking questions of the candidate. Polite and relevant questions: Are they what had made Gianforte so “sick and tired”? Are polite and relevant questions what he was bemoaning when he talked about “the same damn thing”? Speaking of the news media as the people’s enemy and singling out reporters in menacing fashion at public events are both aspects of Trump’s trickle-down authoritarianism. He has done both. For decades, Republican candidates talked and talked and talked about the ravages of the so-called liberal media. Historians may look back at recent events — the manhandling of reporter Michelle Fields by a Trump campaign aide last year; the Jacobs confrontation — as the beginning of an action phase.

For those concerned about press freedom, the first months of the Trump administration have been troubling. Journalists have been yelled at, pepper-sprayed, pinned by security, and even arrested on the job. Now, one reporter has accused a Republican candidate of assault. Joel Simon, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said the recent episodes were not enough to make any sweeping statements about the way journalists are being treated since President Trump took office. “But what’s certainly unprecedented in modern American history is the rhetoric: the way that Trump talks about the media, the constant verbal attacks and the framing of journalists as enemies and purveyors of fake news,” he said. Simon said the committee was gathering data to identify trends and patterns. He said the assault case was particularly alarming.

More than a dozen people sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission saying that their names and contact information were improperly used as part of a widespread political campaign meant to discredit the commission's network neutrality rules. Calling on the FCC to investigate and delete the "dishonest and deceitful" messages made in their name, the citizens said officials cannot afford to ignore the flood of fake comments apparently designed "to manufacture false support for your plan to repeal net neutrality protections."

"To see my good name used to present an opinion diametrically opposed to my own view on Net Neutrality makes me feel sad and violated," said Joel Mullaney, one of the people who signed the letter. "Whoever did this violated one of the most basic norms of our democratic society, that each of us have our own voice, and I am eager to know from what source the FCC obtained this falsified affidavit. I have been slandered."

Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-TX) offered a head-slapping defense of a conspiracy theory he touted on CNN: It was something that he’d seen on the Internet.

Rep Farenthold was suggesting that questions about any link between Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian actors was “deflecting away from some other things that we need to be investigating in.” “There’s still some question,” he said, “as to whether the intrusion at the server was an insider job or whether or not it was the Russians.” CNN’s John Berman interrupted. “I’m sorry,” he said. “The insider job — what are you referring to here? I hope it’s not this information that Fox News just refused to be reporting.” “Again, there’s stuff circulating on the Internet,” Rep Farenthold said. Co-host Poppy Harlow asked if it was responsible to cite Internet rumors as a rationale to launch a congressional investigation. Rep Farenthold replied that the media sometimes relied on anonymous sources for its reporting — so therefore it was.