sgtreport
by Matt Taibbi, Lew Rockwell:
Documents just made public show how groups aligned with the Democratic Party hit a third party rival with an array of underhanded schemes that put Watergate tricksters to shame
“We can just rig our own poll to make it look as shit as possible…”
“Block signature-gathering…”
“Make [them] seem like they might be totally crazy/right-wing wackos to mid-low-info voters…”
“Hijacking their ballot line and pushing extremist candidates to muddy [their] brand…”
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
above quotes are just a few excerpts from incredible documents made public after a long court fight. Details of a plan to “shun,” “stigmatize,” and “destroy” the third party No Labels suggest a Rosetta Stone of corruption, showing groups aligned with the Democratic Party using dirty tricks and elaborate fakery to attack anyone in their electoral path, all while presenting themselves as “pro-democracy” forces.
When filed a year ago on December 4, 2023, No Labels vs. No Labels seemed a picayune trademark dispute. It concerned No Labels, a political alternative founded in 2010 by longtime Democratic fundraiser Nancy Jacobson and backed by since-passed former Senator Joe Lieberman. Armed with $70 million and plans for “nationwide” ballot access, No Labels was whispered about early in the cycle as a potentially serious threat to the Democrats’ election chances, especially in a race with widespread diffidence regarding the two likely nominees, Joe Biden and Donald Trump. The Wall Street Journal article about them from July 2023 was headlined, “A Mysteriously Financed Group That Could Upend a Biden-Trump Rematch.”
The newly released court docs bear out the fact that there was deep concern within the blue activist world about the third-party run. A memo sent from political strategist Lucy Caldwell to Dmitri Mehlhorn, aide to billionaire donor and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, described No Labels as a “looming forest fire” that would be a “nuclear grade threat” if it nominated a candidate and reached a “live campaign environment.”
To prevent that, Caldwell proposed a protracted campaign of “brand destruction,” using “controlled burns” to put the fire out long before the election. As Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson put it less subtly in a tweeted video last April, No Labels needed to be “burned to the fucking ground politically.”
Key No Labels figures knew there was an organized effort to oppose their run, but didn’t start to learn how organized until filing the trademark lawsuit last December. The case seemed more like a matter of trolling than corruption at first. The actual No Labels website, located at nolabels.org, was suing an irksome imitator who’d bought and begun to use the domain nolabels.com. The mystery doppelganger used the same black banner, same font, same yellow oval signup button, even some of the same language, like the slogan “Commonsense Majority”:
Originally Posted at https://www.sgtreport.com
zerohedge
insiderpaper
