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Chris Bray's avatar

You can look at the websites of law firms that sue the federal government to see this discussion:

https://www.nationalsecuritylawfirm.com/when-the-government-misses-the-180-day-deadline-your-options/

"If the agency hasn’t issued a written decision by the end of 180 days, you have the right to treat the silence as a denial and move forward with a federal lawsuit."

https://www.johndaylegal.com/process-for-filing-a-claim-against-the-federal-government-ftca-c/

"If the agency fails to act on your claim within six months after you submit it, you may consider that a denial and file your federal lawsuit at that time."

But Trump filed a claim in 2023 that's still sitting on someone's desk? How? Why?

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Alan's avatar

Qui bono? Why was this fake story released at this point in time?

The questions answer themselves.

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Frank Paynter's avatar

That's an easy one - "Because they didn't have any better story to run". And for them to run one that is SO easy to fact-check, they are either scraping the bottom of the barrel, or they just don't care whether their reporting is in any way factual. My vote is for the latter.

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Korpijarvi's avatar

It's about installing buttons they can later push in election season.

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Korpijarvi's avatar

It's cui bono, not qui.

And I don't agree with Frank below that they ran this story "because they didn't have a better story to run." It's not about "running a story." It's about using the NYT to initiate/seed downstream anti-Trump memetic activity by the True Believers (in Orange Man Bad). It's about seeding future (midterm campaign) talking points.

Chris, I boiled down your excellent piece into the briefest points; another reader might be able to distil it further. But in response to anyone eructating--in person or online--that "TRUMP $230 MILLION ORANGE MAN BAD," try:

1. DOJ did not reply within six months to DJT’s claim filed in late 2023. By US Code (28 U.S.C. § 2675(a)), this is construed as the claim having been denied by the agency.

2. The same holds for a claim filed in summer of 2024.

In both cases DOJ procedurally denied the claims. So please explain what merit is there in bringing up denied claims at this point.

On that USC citation, you say that as, "28 U.S. Code section 2675 [two six seven five] a." It might take a few passes to memorize that. But sometimes this precision opens the door to people realizing media outlets don't document their talking points, as Chris notes.

And you can look up that bit of code in a variety of places. For instance:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/2675

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John Oh's avatar
5dEdited

Thanks for reading the NYT so I don't have to. The question the NYT should be asking is why hasn't Trump filed his claim in federal court? If the claim has been received and there has been no response after 180 days, the claimant can wait if they want, but they can also file suit. Is the implication that Trump can now order the federal agency to find in his favor and pay the claim? I doubt the administration would want that kind of appearance of conflict clogging up it's messaging. It seems to me more the case that the claims have been abandoned or neglected. Not hard to imagine in the course of a campaign and new administration taking office. Count the days on your FOIA request, and if you want to you can sue for the documents after 180 days, or wait several years or more.

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Chris Bray's avatar

America's Foremost Contrary Indicator says that the NYT story is damning, so I'm now forced to conclude that it's completely false in every detail:

https://x.com/DavidAFrench/status/1980719725026902487

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Timothy Rutt's avatar

French delenda est.

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KateLE's avatar

Distraction from the Epstein files seems like a decent guess. Did they only just realize the extent to which The Good People Who Do Good Things are implicated? Or did The Good People Who Do Good Things give them panicky marching orders?

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Aviva W.'s avatar

The guy who donated his presidential salary back to the government is now trying to shake down that same government for millions? You’re right it doesn’t make sense.

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Korpijarvi's avatar

It is damning.

He just as usual gets wrong of whom.

:^>

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Lydia Lozano's avatar

Someone asked him about the claims today at the White House and he didn't seem to be aware of it, but he did say, "Well they OUGHT to pay me." This is crap journalism but I can't figure out why the Times would do this, other than just its rabid TDS.

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Chris Bray's avatar

This video is AMAZING. You're right, he absolutely did not say that he was ordering the DOJ to pay him, and didn't even know what the reporter was asking him about.

https://x.com/EricLDaugh/status/1980742270178771148

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Nancy Benedict's avatar

Wow this negates the whole argument. What would happen if we didn’t have to waste time debunking legacy news stories? Oh wait….that’s their plan.

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Lydia Lozano's avatar

Infuriating isn't it? Deliberately publishing lies and calumny. Over and over.

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Korpijarvi's avatar

No, that's not their plan.

They expect that maybe 1 in 10000 readers/listeners/viewers will even question what they say. (The other 9999 will just nod and seethe how Bad is Orange Man.)

Yes, there is merit in tying up the energies and attention of that tiny minority capable of critical thinking. But "the plan" is to throw discursive pasta shapes against the wall to see what sticks. "Oh, the angel hair stuck nicely; the farfalle fell right off." Then deciding which to serve when, to which audiences, for what desired outcomes.

The sooner people realize that "journalism" is a branch of PR/opinion polling, the better. But it doesn't seem to be happening. For some reason people project their own desire to be truthful onto "journalists," who, like lawyers, doctors, Pharma salesmen (including doctors), etc., aren't in it for truth, but advantage. And they are courtesans and whores supreme, serving hidden masters.

For most people I've encountered, the idea that there is no such thing as "journalism," as they want to believe, is so distressing that they'd rather either exercise blind trust, or disengage.

"The plan" is also to try to embarrass DJT as in the above clip. Or use his reactions in their larger campaigns.

The whole thing is Augean-stables-tier filthy. DJT is laboring to redirect the cleansing waters...and damn, what a job.

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LoveIsCourage's avatar

I think they’re just dishing sleeping slop to the casualties of cognitive warfare. People go back to the trough to feed their narrative narcosis. The Democrats do this on the regular now they speak only to their owned. It’s a cult and entrancement on behalf of the Occultocracy

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Korpijarvi's avatar

They are installing buttons in the electorate that they hope to later push (midterm season).

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TheUnderToad's avatar

So many NYT stories these days based completely on hearsay, specifically of the: "anonymous sources within (fill in the blank) and familiar with details of the story have said" type.

This sort of "sourcing" used to be laughed out of the editor's office and never made it to print before the days of "Orange Man Bad".

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John Geis's avatar

“Anonymous hearsay” is Ivy League Newspeak for “making shit up.”

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CStone's avatar

Poison Ivy League

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Korpijarvi's avatar

As an Ivy League dissident I would like to invite you to go pound sand. With all due respect, as we say in Navy families.

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John Geis's avatar

I have no idea what an “Ivy League dissident” is. Do you dissent from the Ivy League liberal obsession? Or are you an Ivy League student/graduate who dissents from the mainstream zeitgeist as personified by Trump?

I grew up in Pennington, 9 miles from Princeton and always envisioned attending there. Life intervened, and I’m SO glad it did. I would be profoundly embarrassed to have paid so much and have to publicly admit that I’d received my degree from an institution that now professes ideology untethered to reality or history.

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Meri-Lyn Stark's avatar

Thanks for digging for facts. Too bad NYT doesn’t have one honest journalist on staff. And thousands drink its koolaid…..

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Bryson Hull's avatar

Chris - great work as always being an actual journalist and practicing the lost art of skepticism and show me the money and the paper trail. Out of the journalism game for 10 years but know when I find a real one. And facts are not partisan, which is the hallmark of your work. The outcome of what people understand and process from them is what gets partisan and scuzzy. Fearless fidelity to facts is not only onomatopoeiac but what made this country. Keep on rocking and stop making us East Coasters envious of your western hiking porn. I have Bronco that needs that like an aging boomer needs a flashback to the Summer of Love they neither attended nor can remember if they did.

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Tardigrade's avatar

+10 for vocabulary.

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LoveIsCourage's avatar

Nice work again in this essay!

You’ve made clear what I find typical of the NYT. They just say stuff they want people to believe. During the Biden years they were like the DNC paper while in DC we had more of the CIA/administrative state Washington comPost.

The NYT put the Nordstream pipeline sabotage with color photo on their front page. On the same day I couldn’t find it in the Post. The crazy award goes to NYT from me, sciencey fear porn on the front page. They were writing on changes in day length due to the earths rotation and they brought up the wandering of the geomagnetic pole. Then they conflate the rotational axis with the geomagnetic pole and blame the crisis on. You guessed it: climate change.👻

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Michael L's avatar

I hope to see "sciencey fear porn" is real signs in the yards of Berkeley next time I pass through there on my way to do some record shopping and beer drinking, but I suspect my hopes may be for naught.

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Leonard's avatar

The NYT has always been the CIA/MI6 outlet, the WaPo has always been thecPentagon mouthpiece, and the WSJ has always been the NY Fed conduit.

It used to be that the other large newspapers with DC and NYC bureaus would police each other but those bureaus all started closing 30 years ago. It is literally only independents like Bray, Taibbi, etc that do the policing and they don’t have the time and resources to police everything.

Distrust and verify.

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LoveIsCourage's avatar

Thanks that sure sounds right as I think about it looking back in time. Definitely adds to my understanding and it makes sense NYT would be so DNC recently. If WAPO Pentagon then might appear Military Industrial Complex. And WSJ for the Fed would that tend to the interests of the corporate investor/ownership ‘class’ who aren’t a large proportion of Americans as well? More business and government as usual…

I could also imagine the former policing of one another may have been competition for re$ources… within the U.S. The earlier Northeast Yankees vs. Southern Cowboys comes to mind

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Brian Nelson's avatar

Great work. Wasn’t sure what to make of the story, so thank you.

This feels similar to the anonymous senior officers quoted by Washington Times today about how Hegseth ‘lost their trust’…funny, I kinda think the ass-chewing of all flag officers in front of the entire nation was Hegseth, by proxy, sharing our distrust and disgust with them.

There remains millions of turds to flush, from media to academia, to government, to medicine…and they will fight all the swirling way down to the sewer.

bsn

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Luke Lea's avatar

There are serious problems with the NYT itself, or, rather, with "the disgraceful NYT" as I now refer to it.

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Michael L's avatar

After reading Caro's "The Power Broker" (an eye-opening dive into the power that unelected officials quietly yield), I have come to the conclusion that the NY Times was never such a much.

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Franz Kafka's avatar

The Grey Lady is a whore.

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Gunther Heinz's avatar

A cadaver whore. Ugh.

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PapayaSF's avatar
5dEdited

[Edit: previous post was a fingerslip] Maybe it’s just another anonymous source hit job/hoax, but it feels like spin. Maybe Trump is about to win some sort of settlement, and they’re trying to make it look unseemly.

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Maureen Hanf's avatar

And it won't matter whatever Trump says, they'll just say he's lying and the base will eat it up.

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Korpijarvi's avatar

A lazy reply.

YOUR job is to get in there and engage them with facts, and not relent till they listen.

"Journalism" is a grass roots endeavor.

You want to sit on a throne and criticize and dismiss.

Which is exactly what Big Mindf!uck (sorry, but it's a technical term in the industry) intends you to do. Either succumb, or find it all too distasteful to get in the trenches with.

I call you to take the distilled points I supplied above, from our host's/saloniste's excellent piece, and carry them into three "base" places today. Lay them out. Make them reply.

People generally don't wake up on their own.

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Steve Campbell's avatar

If it’s in the NYT it’s probably bullshit. Wait, delete probably.

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Curtis's avatar

It sounds like the NYT is just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. Their sheeple will suck it up and repeat it a thousand times even after it is likely proven to be BS. They still believe the "fine people on both sides" story. Perhaps Jeff Childers will bring it up tomorrow. That's right in his area of expertise.

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Michael L's avatar

I dunno. "Anonymous sources" have proved so credible in the recent past, that I can't help but believe what they are said to be claiming...

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Chris Bray's avatar

Anonymous anti-Trump sources have an especially GOLDEN record...

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John Geis's avatar

Is that a reference to the Steele Dossier’s accusation of Trump & golden showers?

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Michael L's avatar

And a few score others.

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CStone's avatar

😂😂😂

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Korpijarvi's avatar

But it's not about "belief" in the claims.

It's about giving the reader permission to be lazy, and not fact-check on their own.

It is, at root, remission of sins. A religious function.

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John Geis's avatar

As a CPA (and former Revenue Agent at the beginning of my career), let me shed some light. A claimant typically has two years from the date he overpaid a tax or incurred an “injury” caused by the government in which to file a claim.

As Chris cited, Federal law deems a 6 month non-response by the government as constructive denial.

The claimant has the balance of 2 years from the date of injury (or overpaid tax) in which to initiate suit in the appropriate court.

The 2 year limitation period does not begin to run until the claimant discovers the injury and the identity of the responsible party.

It is ENTIRELY plausible that the declassification and disclosure by DNI Gabbard of the documentation of the Dec 2016 meeting in the Obama Oval Office at which the Russia Hoax conspiracy was launched (at Obama’s suggestion), was Trump’s first evidence that the Government itself was responsible, i.e., it wasn’t miscreant employees operating off the books; it was POTUS himself, whose official actions (even when wholly corrupt) ARE the “government.”

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Chris Bray's avatar

The problem with this version is that the NYT says the claims at issue were filed in 2023 and 2024, way before Gabbard's declassification.

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Erik Smeltekop's avatar

It ends like the Epstein files.... In a big smoke cloud of nothingness. Disappears into the ether. This story will be dead and forgotten by the masses by noon tomorrow, when Trump potentially giving clemency to the diddler becomes the new news cycle focus.

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CB's avatar

A big smoke cloud of nothingness that threatens to take down the powers that shouldn't be just as surely as it did Randy Andy and Peter Mandelson. Pardoning Ghislaine would be like felatting Epstein's corpse in front of a joint session of congress.

Mandelson (after a "happy ending"?):

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/480/cpsprodpb/6135/live/9d4f4e10-8d6c-11f0-b391-6936825093bd.jpg.webp

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Dave H.'s avatar

This was one of the main stories on ABC nightly news and none of it made sense. Appreciate the context, but the masses are already up in arms about it in every comment section possible. They’re even going so far as to suggest the “shakedown” was to cover the “destruction” costs of the East wing.

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