Posted on 02/09/2019 4:09:05 AM PST by zeestephen
I think that Bezos makes claims of extortion and hangs all of it on the letter that he published from Dylan Howard about “expediating this situation” by just flat out telling Bezos’s people exactly what they had. Whether or not that holds water depends on the other evidence, because this in and of itself is not the slam dunk he portrays it as. He dances around the situation, and references the Saudis and says that this is a major component, which is not borne out by the letter he has published which makes no reference to the Saudis.
I don’t want to don rose-colored glasses, but ignoring what Mr. Bezos claims without substantiation, and focusing on what he has actually provided, this could be nothing more than “this is what we’ve got, we’ve heard that the Post is about to publish a bunch of claims about us, those claims are in fact unsubstantiated because this is the thing we have (and not the other thing.)”
It almost sounds as though Bezos is trying to rumble the National Enquirer with his own conspiracy theory about them, which is kind of surreal.
Off-the-shelf Stingray devices cost somewhere between $16,000 and $125,000, far too rich for a poor hacker’s pocketbook. Of course, what the government can do for $100,000, anyone else can do for five hundred. Here’s how you build your own Stingray using off the shelf hardware.
https://hackaday.com/2016/04/08/build-your-own-gsm-base-station-for-fun-and-profit/
And here’s me thinking that publishing dick pics was about driving down Amazon stock (so Bezos could buy out his wife at a reduced price) by introducing uncertainty since Bezos is the number one shareholder and he had no pre-nup.
Interesting.
Thanks!
The Wall Street Journal has an op ed by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. on this topic today. He thinks Bezos might be in over even his head on this one.The owner and the company were granted immunity from campaign law violations in exchange for full testimony and document release about the unpublished Trump stories,As to
that could be all to the good if it forces the Enquirer to do the right thing and contest “Campaign Finance Reform” in court. McConnell v. FEC, upholding McCain-Feingold, was a 5-4 decision thanks to Sandra Day O’Connor, with Justice Kennedy dissenting.“Campaign Finance Reform” is nothing but a power grab by “the media” (wire service journalism). We are sorely in need of its abolition. What sense does it make to “keep money out of politics” and claim that you are not abridging the freedom of the press? The only difference between “speech” and “press” is that ”press” represents technology applied to the “useful art” of propagating opinion. Which required money for ink, paper, and presses in the founding era, and still requires money for broadcast air time today.
I’ve heard some girl named Alexa was involved. She’s done things like this before.
You may be right. Which came first. Divorce request or dick pictures. If he manipulated the stock price his wife will get more shares.
Amazon's watching me?
I cannot possibly understand how a man this smart & this successful is dumb enough to take a picture of his genitals with a cell phone & send it out anywhere.
I wouldn’t want to have my privates in a picture of ANY kind.
How could he be that stupid???
Arrogance & Ego sure go hand in hand-—sorry for the pun.
As regards the Washington Post, I recall a story from long ago that suggests they do not mind engaging in extortions themselves.
When Gary Hart was under siege from the Donna Rice scandal there was a period during which he was holed up in his Washington residence, deciding what to do – weather the storm or withdraw from the race. The Washington Post contacted him with new allegations of infidelity – this time with a story about an affair he had carried on with the wife of former Maryland Senator Joseph Tydings. The Post wanted a confirm or deny reaction from him before they ran the story. He asked for time to formulate a response, but instead of responding, he made an announcement that he was withdrawing from the race. The Post never ran the story. Later, in a Madison Wisconsin newspaper, I read the story of how the Post influenced Hart to quit, in an interview with Bill Dixon, who had run Hart’s short-lived campaign. So, they affected his participation in the race by threatening to publish a story that they never ultimately published.
Granted this was decades before the Graham family fire-saled the Post to Jeff Bezos, but the role of the Post at that time was no different than the role of AMI today. Imagine how many times in the intervening years the Post shaped events, instead of reporting on them.
I think you just have to follow the money with this.
The first one in the interrogation chair should be the GF. The prosecutors need to ask the GF if she shared the lovely pictures with anyone?
and then ask Alexa.
More than you know…
Don’t be silly, the floozy is a very beautiful woman. The problem I have with this whole thing is not the attractiveness of the two ladies involved but rather that I suspect that Bezos has apparently decided to try to use his divorce machinations to pile onto the POTUS. It almost reminds me of the conclusion of some of the sillier Disney movies, usually involving dogs, where everyone good or bad winds up piling onto the villain in the end. This sort of thing belongs to the domain of the frivolous and stupid. It all becomes terrifying when you consider that this is the richest man in the world going after the American president.
That's an interesting point.
However, if the National Enquirer is facing the unlimited budget of the Southern District of New York on one hand, and the unlimited budget of Jeff Bezos on the other, outright surrender might be their only realistic option.
If Jeff Bezos was a politically active Conservative Republican, the Washington Post would have NEVER sold him the newspaper, and the IRS and the Department of Justice would have spent the last decade trying to burn Amazon to the ground.
I went to OpenSecrets.com and it looks like he has contributed to both. I suspect that he is fairly pragmatic but unfortunately the pragmatic thing to do in elite circles is to dump on President Trump.
For whatever reason, the elites seem to have a lot of very questionable sacred cows. Maybe he’s a libertarian?
https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=Jeffrey+Bezos
Bezos is a confirmed member of the Political Left.
On the other hand, Amazon's political action committee actually favors GOP candidates.
Bezos avoids most national issues and national candidates.
However, in Washington state, he supports Democrats for every major office, and he supports all the major voter initiatives supported by the state Democratic Party.
. . . and I think that, actually, they already did surrender by entering that consent decree.:-(
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