Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson is locked in a contract dispute with his former network who took him off the air, but continues to enforce the contract he signed with them.  As the contract battle wages, and while litigation with the network continues, Carlson is limited in his options for platform broadcast.

As a result, Tucker Carlson’s personal Twitter account which existed prior to his Fox contract and is not subject to the terms and agreements, remains an outlet for him to use while not violating his non-compete clause.  Almost all other platforms represent what would be considered online competition to Fox Digital, so broadcasting a new show on any of those digital platforms would represent a potential legal issue and not an option. {Direct Rumble Link}

Tonight, Tucker Carlson aired a 10-minute monologue, what he calls “episode 1” from his Twitter account. While Tucker does not financially benefit from the Twitter platform, for the social media owner Elon Musk the broadcast represents much needed content oxygen. Tucker states at the end of his monologue that if Twitter suppresses or uses their internal fact-check mechanism known as ‘Community Notes‘ to control his content, he will exit the platform. WATCH: 

(Reuters) […] Ukraine and Russia blame each other for the collapse of the massive dam on Tuesday, which sent floodwaters across a swathe of the war zone and forced thousands to flee.  Ukraine said Russia committed a deliberate war crime in blowing up the Soviet-era Nova Kakhovka dam, which powered a hydroelectric station. The Kremlin blamed Ukraine, saying it was trying to distract from the launch of a major counteroffensive Moscow says is faltering. (more)

Elon Musk, who not coincidentally entered an ideological alignment with Fox News CEO Rupert Murdoch on behalf of Ron DeSantis, has a vested financial interest in making sure his Community Notes police do not attach warnings and citations to the “controversial” dialogue of Carlson.  While there appears to be an ongoing CN notes war in the background, so far the Musk administrators have been able to keep the platform control agents from impeding the broadcast.

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Andrew Weissmann, Norm Eisen and fellow travelers, wrote an internal prosecution memo for current Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco to use on behalf of their conscripted Special Counsel, Jack Smith. [SEE 186-page Guidance MEMO HERE]

Essentially, what we are witnessing is what skilled researchers would expect to see.

The Lawfare operatives, represented by Weissmann, Eisen and company, are all ideological agents connected directly to the anti-Trump efforts.

I use the term “Lawfare” to describe their general group association, as well as the actual organization funded by the Brookings Institute that carries the same name.

Essentially, Lawfare et al, are the group of current and former Dept of Justice ideologues that we find throughout the deployment of all Main Justice weaponization, activism and corruption.

The Muller team were all Lawfare members. The legal team in/around the accusations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, what Christine Blasey-Ford called “beach friends,” are all Lawfare members.  The legal team behind both of Trump’s impeachment efforts were all Lawfare members.  It is one large network of legally minded ideologues working toward a common goal; they are inside government and connected to the same DOJ minds outside government.

The second thing they have in common is their collective risk within their action.  Many of their activities were/are unlawful (spygate, FISA, Mueller probe, impeachment background etc), so to the extent the Lawfare group can mitigate risk by attacking anyone who would be a threat to them, this is what we see.

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The PGA was taking advantage of an arcane payment and reward system within the sport of golf.  An alternative to the control of the PGA Tour was created by a competing organization called LIV golf.  The LIV Tour paid the pro players with contracts similar to other competitive sports.

The result was a traditional PGA tour furious with the competition in their business model, while simultaneously the LIV tour enthusiastically embraced the game and created a more fun and engaging experience for the fans of golf.  President Trump was one of the first to see the value in the LIV business model, and as the politics of the PGA blacklisted Trump properties, Donald Trump opened his championship courses to all the LIV events. [2022 Truth Social]

President Trump could see the future of the sport and warned last year the PGA players were painting themselves into a corner.  Trump could see the vibrancy of the sport was leaning in favor of the LIV approach.  Donald Trump could also foresee the two competing organizations merging. That merger was announced today, about a year after President Trump noted it was a foregone conclusion.

[PGA TOUR] – The PGA TOUR, DP World Tour and the Public Investment Fund (PIF) today announced a landmark agreement to unify the game of golf, on a global basis. The parties have signed an agreement that combines PIF’s golf-related commercial businesses and rights (including LIV Golf) with the commercial businesses and rights of the PGA TOUR and DP World Tour into a new, collectively owned, for-profit entity to ensure that all stakeholders benefit from a model that delivers maximum excitement and competition among the game’s best players.

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Memorial Day customarily kicks off summer and the beer beverage industry generally looks forward to the enhanced sales that come from summer.  However, if the recently published reports of Anheuser-Busch sales are accurate, which includes a stunning 60% sales drop during the holiday, the brand position of Bud Light is in freefall.

While the impacts do have a regional trend based on consumer boycotts and patterns, when the Daily Mail reports, “numbers are suffering primarily due to a decline in Bud Light sales that reached as high as a 60 percent drop off over the week that ended on Memorial Day,” we can be certain the executive offices of A/B are watching closely. The feedback from wholesalers and distributors to the parent company must be something beyond alarm.

Worse still, the forward-looking data trend doesn’t offer any hope.  Things are getting worse for the parent company.

(Daily Mail) – […] For the week ending May 20, Bud Light sales across the US fell nearly 26 percent compared to the same period last year. For the week ending May 6, in-store sales plummeted 23.6 percent. And the week before that, ending April 29, sales dropped by 23.3 percent.

This follows declines in sales for the week ending April 22, which saw a 21.4 percent decline. Seven days earlier, the dip has been 17 percent, according to NielsenIQ data provided to Dailymail.com by Bump Williams Consultancy.

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The New York Times has gained insider information on the current advertising revenue for the social media platform Twitter. [Article Here]  Ignoring the nonsense narrative engineering and just focusing on the data itself, the revenue side for Twitter is half what we previously estimated.  This makes the overlay for decisions on platform content even more stark.

According to the data, ad revenue for the month of April was a lackluster $88 million.  That’s a pace of just over $1 billion a year.  With a pre-Musk operating expense of $4.5 billion, and pre-Musk revenue at $4 billion cited by the Twitter owner as the backdrop, here’s the outlook.

Assuming post Musk labor cost reductions saved $500 million, a decline in revenue to $1 billion/yr would be a $3.0 billion deficit, to wit you would need to add the $1.5 billion in debt service as part of the investor buyout structure.

That puts Twitter into a $4.5 billion loss ballpark per year.

This is the high end of what Musk previously estimated in public statements.  Now we see why.

(New York Times) – Twitter’s U.S. advertising revenue for the five weeks from April 1 to the first week of May was $88 million, down 59 percent from a year earlier, according to an internal presentation obtained by The New York Times.  (read more)

$1 billion per year in advertising revenue is a whopping 75% loss from the claimed $4 billion in revenue before the Musk purchase.  Perhaps the Fidelity estimate of company value at $15 billion is closer to reality.

If the value of Twitter has dropped to the $15 billion level, that means almost all of the $30 billion in personal equity Musk put into the company has been lost.

Current investor debt is $12.5 billion, with $1.5 billion in debt service/yr. A valuation of $15 billion would only leave Musk with around $2.5 billion in equity position.  If the valuation is accurate, Musk personally would have lost around $27.5 billion in this Twitter platform purchase.

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Here we go again with the ever-familiar silo defense.  The FBI is refusing to hand over the unclassified FD-1023 stating there is an ongoing investigation using the confidential human source who made allegations outlined in the document.  Remember, the allegations and the statement record was created in July of 2020, almost three years ago.

Prior to last week, the FBI refused to say the 6-page unclassified document existed.  After House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer told FBI Director Chris Wray he had already seen the unclassified document via a whistleblower, then Comey admitted the FBI indeed had it.  Today, the FBI is refusing to release the document, stating it is now captive as part of an “ongoing investigation.”  The claimed investigation began July 2020 – the investigation is “ongoing”.  Go figure.

James Comer said he will begin the process, this Thursday, to hold FBI Director Christopher Wray in contempt of Congress.  WATCH:

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~ The Background is HERE ~

A brief post just to emphasize a point about DC and how the power centers protect themselves.  You might remember when Attorney Jeff Sessions was told he needed to recuse himself from anything to do with the Trump-Russia investigation.  We know from FOIA requests of schedules, the participants in the meeting on the date of those discussions:

Jeff Sessions was forced to recuse himself at the conclusion of a meeting involving Jody Hunt, Dana Boente, Jim Crowell, Tashina Guahar and Scott Schools; an apparent conflict of interest.  Now consider….

Mary McCord was Acting Asst. Attorney General for the National Security Division, when she submitted the fraudulently constructed FISA application used against Carter Page. Mary McCord, knowingly and with specific intent, defrauded the court and broke the law.  Mary McCord then went on to join Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler in the construction of the articles of impeachment. She did not recuse herself. 

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Former DeSantis Press Secretary Christina Pushaw came directly to the Florida Governor’s office after working in Ukraine on behalf of Volodymyr Zelenskyy.  There is a clear commonality of interest in the actions of Pushaw both in Ukraine and in Florida.

Once the national DeSantis operation was fully constructed and funded, in August 2022 Pushaw left the governor’s office to assemble and coordinate the previously solicited social media influencers for the 2024 operation.

After organizing the operatives, Pushaw is now spearheading a U.S. online influence campaign.

In essence, a registered foreign agent is now working on the social media platform Twitter to construct disinformation on behalf of Ron DeSantis. Elon Musk is apparently a partner in the effort, as the details of the operation begin to surface.

Their intelligence community method is to use operatives within Twitter “community notes” to control any negative opinion of DeSantis.  If anything is identified that undermines the DeSantis operation, Pushaw triggers a specific account “@NoteNeeded” which contains embed operatives who swarm to her commands and affix labels to Tweets designated as harmful to the interests of the DeSantis regime.

The DeSantis election influence operation is similar to what the U.S. State Dept (Nuland) and USAID (S Power) do in foreign countries; only in this example, Ms. Pushaw is working to influence domestic U.S. politics through the social media platform Twitter.

The various accounts all carry the same alligator emoji as an identifying characteristic. Here’s an example of the operation at work, as well as an explanation from Twitter that just doesn’t reconcile with the claims.

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House Speaker Kevin McCarthy appears with Maria Bartiromo to address criticism about details within his debt ceiling bill.  The criticism is very valid, and is being made by many people who are unhappy with the deal to raise the debt ceiling.  However, the primary defense point of McCarthy surrounds a return to regular budgetary order.

As noted by McCarthy, the 12 house appropriations bill that form the traditional federal budget, are due in Aug/Sept for fiscal year 2025 which begins October 1st.  That is where substantive spending will be reduced, well below current spending levels.  However, Bartiromo confronts that outlook by asking ‘what if’ the Senate doesn’t take up the federal budget bill, preferring instead to use the funding mechanism provided within the debt ceiling bill.  {Direct Rumble Link}

The budget debate may sound somewhat parliamentarian, because the nuance of federal budgets is exactly that.  The mechanism to force congress to create a regular order budget is the debt ceiling. Essentially the national credit limit. If you take away the mechanism to force the budget, there is no force mechanism to require the budget.  WATCH:

The amount of debt carried in your own household budget is only a problem if you have a limit on your credit. If you have unlimited credit, meaning you can borrow endless amounts of money, then you can spend as much as you want. This willy-nilly raising of the national debt ceiling is the issue at the core of why federal budgets are not passed.

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I’m going to go into the deep weeds on this story, because many people are missing a key facet.  The names behind the Trump targeting operation are included, along with citations for independent checks by House congressional investigators.

Inside the recently released report by John Durham [CITATION], the special counsel outlines how former FBI Director James Comey was intimately involved in the creation of the Carter Page FISA application.  Durham notes that Comey kept asking the DOJ National Security Division and FBI counterintelligence investigators, “Where’s the FISA, we need the FISA.”  However, John Durham never interviewed James Comey or Andrew McCabe.  The former FBI Director and Deputy refused to cooperate or give testimony to John Durham.  So, how did John Durham have details about the demands of Comey?

The answer is found in the footnotes.  Durham reviewed transcripts of interviews given by Andrew McCabe to the Office of the Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, who previously investigated FBI conduct in the origin of the Carter Page FISA.  Durham pulled quotes from that transcript. [Footnote #1207, page 199 – Durham Report]

♦QUESTION: If Andrew McCabe gave testimony to the OIG about the motives and impetus of FBI Director James Comey in pushing for the Carter Page FISA application, why did the OIG report never outline those transcribed interviews?  Why was the interview transcript never included in the 2019 OIG report?

[ NOTE to Congress.  Now that you know a transcribed interview of Andrew McCabe exists in the OIG office, request the transcription and release it to the public.]

Let me answer those questions without the customary pretending from the DC professional political class.  The short version is that OIG Michael Horowitz was trying to protect the DOJ and FBI. The longer version is a coverup that includes Rod Rosenstein, Bill Barr and yes, John Durham.  I will share that story below.

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