NEW Filing in Giuliani Defamation Case EXPOSE More TRUMP CRIMES
by Michael Popok
MeidasTouch
Jul 12, 2023 Legal AF Podcast - Full Episodes
Michael Popok of Legal AF reports on new documents just disclosed in the Federal civil defamation case against Giuliani that show the extent of the election stealing conspiracy, including how close Trump was to seizing voting machines, suspending the Constitution, and declaring Martial Law to stay in power.
Transcript
This is Michael Popok. Civil cases produce evidence that prosecutors can use in criminal cases. That's so important that I'm going to say it again: civil cases and their discovery mechanism produce documents and evidence that somebody like Jack Smith can use in criminal prosecutions. We're seeing it all over again in a civil case brought by two Fulton County election workers, Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman against Rudy Giuliani, Rudy Giuliani, who's been a lawyer for well, he's now suspended in one state, and soon to be disbarred in another, but was a lawyer for 50 years, is screwing up the exchange of documents so badly that he's given the opponents, the plaintiffs' lawyers, the opportunity to file a motion for sanctions, which they did on 7-11-23 -- what an unlucky date for Rudy Giuliani -- against him telling the judge that Rudy Giuliani in the last 18 months has not meaningfully participated in discovery, in producing documents or evidence in this case, despite his requirement under the law and a court order to do so, and as a result he should get the equivalent of a civil case death penalty -- the case should be decided against him at this junction without even going to trial -- that a default judgment should be entered against him because of what he's doing. That is the first headline for the motion that was just filed by Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman's lawyers. Rudy Giuliani could likely be hit with a default judgment as a result of game-playing and failure to cooperate in his good faith obligations and discovery headline.
Headline two is that Rudy produced privileged logs, which I'm going to explain on a little bit of a breakout session of legal AF right here, privilege logs listing in 25 pages all of the documents he is not at the moment going to produce, but that he has in his possession, claiming some sort of privilege, which means it has to ultimately be decided by the judge after seeing those documents in camera -- a Latin way of saying only the judge gets to see them first -- and then decide whether they go over to the other side.
Now you're supposed to -- let me give you the teaser first for the privilege log, and then I'll tell you how poorly done the privilege log was for Rudy Giuliani, further compounding his problems.
Firstly let's talk about the names that are in there, even if I don't know what's in it. If you ever had any doubt, in the relevant time-period of the end of the election in early November through Jan 6 and beyond, who Rudy Giuliani was working for, and who was in his group, his gang, a civil conspiracy, his criminal conspiracy gang, well just look at his text message lists, and you'll have no doubt.
So if you go through there you see the following names, and groups, and combinations of text messages: Bernie Kerik, distressed, disgraced, former police commander in New York, who went to jail and was pardoned, or had a sentence commuted, by Donald Trump. Jenna Ellis, who just barely didn't lose her law license, for all the work she did with Giuliani, as an incompetent election lawyer, spreading falsehoods about the election, where she had to admit to her Bar Association, her bar grievance committee, that she told untruths about the election. Christina Bobb, right, who's cooperating with the Department of Justice, and was the lawyer for Donald Trump for all things Mar-A-Lago and beyond, and signed the certificate falsely claiming that everything in this envelope was all of the top secret information that Donald Trump retained at Mar-A-Lago. And that was a lie. So you also have a Victoria Toensing. Victoria Toensing is a woman who practices law with her husband [Joseph diGenova],and is right-wing Maga. I mean she just posted -- we'll put it up here in my hot take -- she just posted on her own social media that the arrest, the indictment in abstention, because the guy fled the country to Cyprus, this spy for China of Israeli and U.S citizenship, that whole Chinese-illegal-lobbying-arms-brokering-selling-oil-for-the-Iranians-while-an-American-citizen -- that's all made up, because he was also going to be a whistleblower against Joe Biden. That Vic. So that was her tweet. We just saw that Victoria Toensing, of course, is inside this QAnon fake election huddle with Team Crazy, and it's Captain Rudy Giuliani, while they're trying to overthrow the election, at least in the court system. So Victoria Toensing.
Victoria Toensing
@VicToensing
No surprise. @SDNY indicted Biden corruption whistleblower, @GalLuft. SDNY pursues anyone who has info re Biden corruption. Foreign Agents Registration Act is a favorite weapon. SDNY made up FARA violation when illegally executing search warrants vs. @RudyGiuliani and me.
11:04 AM - Jul 11, 2023
Victoria Toensing
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 7/12/23
Toensing in 2002
Born: Victoria Ann Long, October 16, 1941 (age 81)[1], Colón, Panama
Education: Indiana University, Bloomington (BS); University of Detroit (JD)
Political party: Republican
Spouse(s): Trent Toensing, (m. 1962; div. 1976)[2][3]; Joseph diGenova (m. 1981)[4]
Children: 3, including Amy Toensing
Victoria Ann Toensing (née Long; born October 16, 1941) is an American attorney, Republican Party operative[5][6][7][8] and with her husband, Joseph diGenova, a partner in the Washington law firm diGenova & Toensing.[8][9] Toensing and diGenova frequently appeared on Fox News and Fox Business channels, until diGenova used a November 2019 appearance to spread conspiracy theories about George Soros, leading to widespread calls for him to be banned from the network.[10] In 2019, Toensing and diGenova began representing Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash in his efforts to block extradition to the United States under a federal indictment and became embroiled in the Trump–Ukraine scandal. The couple has worked with Rudy Giuliani in support of President Donald Trump beginning in 2018, and was named to join a legal team led by Giuliani to overturn the results of the 2020 United States presidential election in which Trump was defeated.[8][11][12][13]
Early life and education
Toensing graduated from Indiana University in 1962 with a degree in education. Toensing was active with the Republican Party in Michigan. She taught high-school English until she entered law school, earning a J.D. from the University of Detroit School of Law in 1975.[14][12]
She joined the U.S. attorney's office in Detroit, where she prosecuted narcotics cases.[12]
In 1981, Toensing became chief counsel to Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,[15] where she helped draft the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982.
News and politics
Reagan administration
Toensing was a deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department during the Reagan administration. She led a counterterrorist investigation into the 15 May Organization for the bombing and attempted bombing of two Pan Am jets in 1982.[14]
Clinton investigations
DiGenova and Toensing established their law firm, diGenova & Toensing, in January 1996.[12][9]
Emily Bazelon of Slate has called Toensing "a blanketer of the airwaves about the tawdriness of the Lewinsky affair."[15] Toensing and her husband made regular appearances on television claiming that they were the target of investigations by the Clinton administration.[16]
Commenting on their role in the 1998 House of Representatives Teamsters investigation, Rep. Bill Clay, a Missouri Democrat, said, "They've become a public spectacle, which means they can't be impartial... It's a payoff from Newt Gingrich and the Republican Party to both Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova.... They have been on television over 200 times and not once have they been talking about an issue we're paying them $25,000 a month to handle for the Congress. It's a hell of a part-time job."[16]
The WISH List
Toensing was a founder and board member of The WISH List, a PAC seeking to elect pro-choice Republican women to public office.[17] The PAC was inspired by EMILY's List, a pro-choice Democratic PAC, and Toensing advocated for a "big tent" Republican Party that includes both pro-life and pro-choice members.[18]
Valerie Plame investigation
Toensing was a frequent Republican commentator in the media during the Plame affair, a political scandal that led to the conviction of Scooter Libby, assistant to Vice President Dick Cheney.[19][20] The scandal involved the public outing of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent, shortly after Plame's husband, former diplomat Joseph C. Wilson, wrote an op-ed in 2003 alleging that the Bush administration manipulated intelligence in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.[21][22] In March 2005, Toensing submitted an amicus curiae brief in support of Matt Cooper and Judith Miller, two journalists who were subpoenaed in the Plame investigation for refusing to reveal information obtained from confidential sources. In the brief, she "argued that the law couldn't have been broken when Valerie Plame's cover as a CIA agent was blown because her status wasn't really covert."[15] She also contended that Plame did not have a cover to be blown, citing a July 23, 2004, article in The Washington Times that argued that her status as an undercover CIA agent may have been known to Russian and Cuban intelligence operations prior to the article (by Robert Novak) that revealed her status as a CIA employee.
In April 2018, Toensing represented Scooter Libby at the time when President Donald Trump pardoned him.[23] Libby, the assistant to Vice President Dick Cheney, had been convicted of obstruction of justice and perjury in 2007 regarding the leak of Plame's identity.[20]
2008 election
Toensing supported former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson in the Republican primaries for the 2008 presidential election.[15]
Involvement with Trump, his associates and Ukraine
On March 19, 2018, Toensing and her husband, diGenova, were hired by President Donald Trump to serve on his legal team for the Special Counsel investigation.[24][25] DiGenova served as the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia from 1983 to 1988.[26][27] However, Trump cancelled the hires several days later due to potential conflicts of interest, though Trump personal attorney Jay Sekulow said they might assist in other legal matters.[28][29]
Toensing represents Mark Corallo, who had previously served as a spokesman for Trump's private legal team during the investigation into possible collusion between members of Trump's 2016 campaign and the Russian government.[30][31] Robert Mueller interviewed Corallo as part of the Special Counsel investigation.[32][33]
Toensing has also represented Sam Clovis, a former Trump campaign co-chair, and Erik Prince, the founder of the private military company Blackwater, who has informally advised Trump.[27]
In spring 2019, Toensing began representing former Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor Shokin and then-prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko. Giuliani and his associates met with Lutsenko in early 2019 to discuss possible investigations of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Then-United States ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch had openly criticized Lutsenko for his poor anti-corruption record, and Lutsenko spread false allegations about Yovanovitch, which he later recanted. Giuliani considered Yovanovitch an obstacle to investigations of the Bidens and persuaded Trump to remove her from office in spring 2019. By April 2021, a continuing federal investigation was examining Yovanovitch's removal and evidence relating to Toensing.[34][35]
In July 2019, Toensing and her husband were hired by the Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash to defend him from extradition to the United States on a bribery indictment.[36][37][38] He has been living in Austria since being arrested there at the request of American authorities in 2014 and released on $155 million bail.[39] In 2017, the United States Justice Department described Firtash as an "upper-echelon [associate] of Russian organized crime."[40] As a middleman for the Russian natural gas giant Gazprom, Firtash was known for funneling money to campaigns of pro-Russia politicians in Ukraine[41] and is also a onetime business partner of Paul Manafort, a Trump 2016 campaign chairman.[42] Firtash obtained his middleman position with the agreement of Russian president Vladimir Putin and, according to Firtash, Russian organized crime boss Semion Mogilevich.[43][39] When he was vice president, Biden had urged the Ukrainian government to eliminate middlemen such as Firtash from the country's natural gas industry, and to reduce the country's reliance on imports of Russian natural gas.[44]
After Firtash hired diGenova and Toensing, Giuliani acquired a statement[45] from former Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor Shokin that falsely alleged Biden had pressured Ukraine to fire him in an effort to cover up corruption committed by himself and his son. Shokin's statement noted that it was prepared "at the request of lawyers acting for Dmitry Firtash ('DF'), for use in legal proceedings in Austria."[46][47] Giuliani had presented the Shokin statement during television appearances, and Bloomberg News reported that its sources told them Giuliani's publicity of the Shokin statement had greatly reduced the chances of the Justice Department dropping the charges against Firtash, as it would appear to be a political quid pro quo.[48]
In August 2019, Toensing and diGenova met with Attorney General William Barr to argue against the charges on Firtash. Prior to that meeting, Barr had been briefed in detail on the initial Trump-Ukraine scandal whistleblower complaint within the CIA that had been forwarded to the Justice Department, as well as on Giuliani's activities in Ukraine. Barr declined to intercede in the case, according to sources who talked to The Washington Post.[49][44]
In October 2019, Lev Parnas, a businessman who was working for diGenova and Toensing's firm as an interpreter in the Firtash case, was one of two men arrested at Dulles International Airport and accused by federal prosecutors of funneling foreign money into U.S. elections.[50] The New York Times reported in November 2019 that Giuliani had directed Parnas to approach Firtash with the recommendation to hire diGenova and Toensing, with the proposition that Firtash could help to provide compromising information on Biden, an arrangement Parnas' attorney Joseph Bondy described was "part of any potential resolution to [Firtash's] extradition matter."[44] In November 2019, Bondy told The Washington Post that Parnas had been part of a group that met frequently in spring 2019 at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., to discuss the Biden matter, among other topics. The group, according to Bondy, was convened by Giuliani, Trump's personal attorney, and included Parnas, his business associate Igor Fruman, as well as journalist John Solomon and Toensing and diGenova.[51] Phone records unearthed during impeachment proceedings in 2019 revealed that there were regular contacts between Solomon, Giuliani, Toensing, Toensing's client and Giuliani associate Lev Parnas, and other Trump allies.[52]
Toensing and diGenova were frequent guests on Fox News and Fox Business throughout 2019.[10] In November 2019, diGenova used an appearance on Fox Business to spread conspiracy theories about George Soros and make unevidenced claims that Soros controlled the State Department. After that appearance, which resulted in widespread calls for Fox to ban diGenova, Toensing and diGenova stopped appearing on the network.[53]
In November 2020, Trump named Toensing, diGenova, Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis to join a legal team led by Giuliani to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election in which Trump was defeated.[13]
On April 28, 2021, federal agents executed a search warrant related to the Justice Department's ongoing criminal probe into Giuliani's pro-Trump political activities in Ukraine, at the home of Toensing, taking her cell phone.[54] Her law firm released a statement asserting she had been told she was not a target of an investigation.[55] In a May 2021 court filing, investigators disclosed that in late 2019 they acquired a search warrant for Toensing's iCloud account, and that of Giuliani, and for an email account belonging to her. Toensing and Giuiliani demanded to review the documents underlying the warrants, asserting their attorney-client privilege with clients may have been violated, which investigators disputed, arguing the attorneys had no special privilege to review the documents prior to any charges. Investigators said they employed a "filter team" to prevent them from seeing information potentially protected by attorney-client privilege.[56][57][58]
Toensing and her husband were among several Trump associates who were emailed by OANN anchor Christina Bobb on December 13, 2020 regarding efforts by Republicans in seven states to appoint false electors and create fraudulent certificates of ascertainment to be submitted to vice president Mike Pence for certification on January 6, 2021.[59]
Personal life
The former Victoria Long married Trent Toensing in 1962; the couple divorced in 1976.[3] In 1981, she married Joseph diGenova.[4] DiGenova and Toensing are partners in the eponymous Washington, D.C. law firm.[60]
Toensing has three children from her first marriage, including Todd Toensing of Jericho, Vermont; Amy Toensing, a photojournalist;[61] and Brady Toensing, who joined the Justice Department in June 2019 as senior counsel in its Office of Legal Policy.[62][63] Formerly, Brady Toensing was vice chair of the Vermont Republican Party, as well as a high-profile and controversial Vermont lawyer, and partner in his mother's and step-father's law firm.[60][64][65] The Justice Department has said that Brady Toensing is recused from matters involving the diGenova & Toensing law firm, including the Trump–Ukraine scandal.[66] It was asserted that he helped to choose judicial nominees for Trump.[66]
You have Katherine Friess. Where is Catherine Friess? We have to put her on the back of a milk carton, because Katherine Friess used to be a lawyer who was very proud to work with Rudy Giuliani and all the others, but she's nowhere to be found. She's so nowhere to be found, that the lawyers in this defamation case against Rudy Giuliani, have moved the judge to try to serve her, to find her, to serve her through alternate methods. She doesn't want anything to do with this case. She's a bar member somewhere, but they can't get her served. But at one time she was happily and notoriously tweeting, and texting, and emailing with Rudy Giuliani. So she's in the text, in the emails.
Jan. 6 committee subpoenas Antrim lawsuit witness Katherine Friess
by Mardi Link [email protected]
Record Eagle
Mar 3, 2022
Matthew DePerno and Katherine Friess are greeted by Antrim County Administrator Peter Garwood outside of the Antrim County Building in Bellaire on Dec. 6, 2020. Record-Eagle file photo/Mike Krebs
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A political operative who in November 2020 twice visited Antrim County via private jet as part of a team consulting on a local election-related lawsuit, has been subpoenaed by the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Katherine Friess, of Arlington, Virginia and Vail, Colorado — listed in court documents as an expert witness in a since-dismissed civil suit accusing Antrim County of voter fraud — must produce documents and appear for a deposition March 29, a letter from Committee Chair Bennie G. Thompson to Friess and dated March 1, states.
The letter references documents already on file with the committee, as well as previous reporting by Politico and the Record-Eagle.
“Between mid-November 2020 and January 6, 2021 (and thereafter), you actively promoted claims of election fraud on behalf of former President Trump and sought to convince state and federal officials to take steps to overturn the results,” the letter from Thompson to Friess states.
“You were also involved in efforts to subpoena voting machines from county election boards and, at one point, traveled to Michigan in an attempt to obtain voting machine data directly from local officials,” the letter states.
Members of the Select Committee last month subpoenaed Friess’ phone, text, private message and other communication records, sent or received between Nov. 1, 2020 and Jan. 31, 2021, a timeframe which includes dates Friess traveled to Antrim County.
Friess did not respond to a request for comment nor did her attorney, Raymond A. Mansolillo, of Boston.
Local officials previously said Friess was among out-of-state visitors who arrived in Antrim County on or about Nov. 27, 2020, and visited municipal offices in Star Township and the Village of Mancelona as well as Central Lake Township, where they were shown tape from a precinct tabulator.
A sign-in sheet, provided to the Record-Eagle in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, also lists Friess as among those at the Antrim County Building Dec. 6, 2020, to conduct a “forensic examination” of the county’s election equipment.
Antrim County Clerk Sheryl Guy predicted the phone records, if provided to the Select Committee, would show several calls in November 2020 from Friess to Guy’s office.
“She called me several times and wanted me to open everything up, open up the machines,” Guy said Monday, of calls she received from Friess, where Friess requested access to the county’s voting equipment.
“This was before the lawsuit was filed and Bill Bailey was the one who put her onto me,” Guy said. “He wanted me to talk with her. I told her I did not have the authority to do what she wanted. Then I stopped taking her calls.”
Bailey is a local realtor and former member of the county’s planning commission, who, on Nov. 23, 2020, filed suit in 13th Circuit Court, accusing the county of violating his constitutional rights and of using voting equipment which he claimed had been pre-programmed for fraud.
Bailey deferred comment to his attorney, Matthew DePerno.
DePerno did not return a request seeking comment.
Antrim County has been the subject of repeated and false claims about fraud in the 2020 presidential election, following acknowledged mistakes by Guy and staff in her office.
In November 2020 Guy acknowledged her office did not properly update Dominion Voting Systems software to accommodate ballot changes in some precincts prior to the election.
Days after Bailey sued the county in 2020, Judge Kevin Elsenheimer granted a request filed by Bailey’s attorney, DePerno, allowing the Dec. 6, 2020 exam of the county’s voting equipment.
Guy said Monday it was her understanding Friess was the organizer of this team; a resulting report, authored by Russell Ramsland, of Texas-based Allied Security Operations Group, accusing Dominion Voting Systems of deliberately altering election results, has been repeatedly debunked by state and national elections experts.
An aide to then-President Trump emailed a copy of the ASOG report to Jeffrey A. Rosen, then the incoming acting U.S. Attorney General, emails posted on a public government website show.
The same report was also referenced in other documents provided to the Select Committee, including a “Strategic Communications Plan” of the “Giuliani Presidential Legal Defense Team” seeking to put pressure on Republican senators in six states — including Michigan — between Dec. 27, 2020 and Jan. 6, 2021, the plan states.
Bernard Kerik, a former New York City Police commissioner hired by Trump’s legal team as an investigator tasked with looking into claims of election fraud, provided the plan document to the Select Committee in December.
Friess is listed in a related “privilege log,” also provided by Kerik to the Select Committee, describing additional documents in Kerik’s possession he planned to withhold, citing attorney work product privilege held by former President Trump.
Friess is fighting the phone records subpoena in court, last month arguing in a complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Colorado, it violates her First Amendment rights and attorney-client privilege.
“Since November 2019, Katherine Friess has counseled the President and his legal team full time in her position as a staff attorney to President Donald Trump,” the complaint seeking to quash the subpoena, filed Feb. 22 by Mansolillo on behalf of Friess, states. “She also derives meaning and satisfaction from her work outside politics as an attorney.”
Friess said in an affidavit filed with the complaint she volunteered as an election integrity attorney, observing ballot counting for the 2020 national elections while continuing to serve other clients.
Friess is not the first attorney to assist as a volunteer in Trump’s effort to discredit the results of the 2020 Presidential election, then argue attorney-client privilege in an apparent attempt to deflect a subpoena by the Jan. 6 Select Committee.
Attorney John Eastman, an ally of Trump who promoted a strategy that then-Vice President Mike Pence could decline to certify the 2020 Presidential election results, received notice from Verizon Communications Dec. 3, 2021, that his calls, texts and emails during the same three-month period had been subpoenaed by the Select Committee.
Eastman, too, filed suit against Thompson, the Select Committee and a cellphone carrier — in this case Verizon — and also states in court filings the subpoena violates attorney client privilege.
An attorney for the Select Committee, House Counsel Douglas Letter, has argued in court filings Eastman has provided no evidence of any legal relationship with the former president, however.
Eastman did, in court filings, provide a Dec. 5, 2020 engagement letter for legal services to Trump and the Trump campaign, but it was not signed by Eastman or Trump.
Bailey’s lawsuit was dismissed in May by Judge Elsenheimer, who also stayed other pending legal issues.
In June, DePerno appealed that decision, on behalf of Bailey, to the state Court of Appeals.
Appellate briefs have been filed and oral arguments requested; it is unclear when the Court of Appeals will hear the case and rule.
In the meantime, DePerno in July announced his candidacy in the Republican primary for Michigan Attorney General and in September was endorsed by Trump.
Lara Logan, right wing Maga journalist.
Lara Logan, Once a Star at CBS News, Is Now One for the Far Right: The former chief foreign affairs correspondent is now a popular guest on podcasts hosted by vaccine skeptics and deniers of the 2020 election.
by Jeremy W. Peters
New York Times
May 22, 2022
Lara Logan in 2016. Some of her former CBS News colleagues recalled that when they worked together, her politics were not always easy to categorize. Credit...Amanda Friedman/Trunk Archive
When Lara Logan reached the heights of American journalism more than a decade ago, as the chief foreign affairs correspondent for CBS News, her bosses didn’t think twice about sending her to cover the biggest stories in the world. Producers clamored to work with her as she landed interviews with a Taliban commander, chronicled the Arab Spring and tracked the Ebola outbreak. Former President Barack Obama called her to wish her well after the most traumatic event of what seemed like a limitless career: She was sexually assaulted while covering a demonstration in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2011.
But today Ms. Logan cuts a far different figure in American media. Instead of on national news broadcasts, she can be found as a guest on right-wing podcasts or speaking at a rally for fringe causes, promoting falsehoods about deaths from Covid vaccines and conspiracy theories about voter fraud.
Recently, she downplayed the seriousness of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol on one of those shows. “This is now the crime of the century?” she asked sarcastically. She has echoed pro-Kremlin attacks on the United States, accusing Americans of “arming the Nazis of Ukraine.” And she has compared Dr. Anthony S. Fauci and Hillary Clinton to some of Hitler’s most notorious henchmen.
Her latest project is a forthcoming documentary on voting machines called “Selection Code” that is being financed by Mike Lindell, the chief executive of My Pillow, who has helped spread some of the most outrageous myths about the 2020 presidential election.
From the outside, Ms. Logan’s path has been one of the most puzzling in the modern history of television news. Her reporting for “60 Minutes” and the “CBS Evening News” helped inform the nation’s understanding of the toll that a decade of military conflict was taking on American forces. CBS News executives envisioned her as a next-generation star in the mold of a Mike Wallace or Dan Rather.
But her transformation, into a star of far-right media, is one that former colleagues who worked closely with her said did not completely come out of nowhere.
More than half a dozen journalists and executives who worked with Ms. Logan at “60 Minutes,” most of whom spoke anonymously to discuss private interactions with her, said she sometimes revealed political leanings that made them question whether she could objectively cover the Obama administration’s military and foreign policy moves. She appeared increasingly conservative in her politics over the years, they said, and more outspoken about her suspicions of the White House’s motives and war strategy.
Some said her opinions started to dovetail with the views of Obama critics she relied on as sources then who have since become close allies of former President Donald J. Trump, including Lindsey Graham, the hawkish Republican senator from South Carolina, and Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who aided efforts to attempt to overturn the 2020 election and has embraced numerous other conspiracy theories.
Still, Ms. Logan’s turn has disappointed many who considered her bright and fearless and admired her for returning again and again to Iraq and Afghanistan despite nearly losing her life in 2003, when an American military vehicle she was in was hit by Taliban fire. She lay unconscious while her crew and military personnel scrambled to drag her to safety, thinking she was dead.
“She was extraordinarily courageous in her war reporting,” said Ira Rosen, a former “60 Minutes” producer who wrote a book about his years with the network, “Ticking Clock.”
“When I think of Lara,” Mr. Rosen added, “I want to remember the Lara who put her life on the line reporting for CBS News in Afghanistan and Egypt. The one now I almost don’t even want to know about.”
When reached for comment, Ms. Logan said she wouldn’t participate in “a hit piece,” and added, “I’m not interested,” before abruptly hanging up. But today she speaks often to conservative talk show hosts about her days at CBS, describing what she views as a culture of conformity in the mainstream media.
“The moment I wasn’t toeing the line, then I was, ‘Oh, she used to be great, what happened to her?’” Ms. Logan said on a recent episode of Mr. Lindell’s web show, “The Lindell Report.”
“‘Oh, she’s unhinged and disgraced,’” Ms. Logan added, referring to the criticism and ostracism she has faced in recent months after making disparaging comments about public health officials like Dr. Fauci, among others.
Ms. Logan on Fox News. Her employment at a production company that made a show on the Fox News streaming service ended after she made a series of inflammatory remarks. Credit...Fox News
In November, after she compared Dr. Fauci to Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who performed inhumane experiments on concentration camp prisoners, Ms. Logan was dumped by the production company that made a show she starred in on Fox Nation, the streaming service for Fox News. Her longtime talent agency also severed ties with her, according to one news executive.
Since then, she has been relegated even further into the periphery of conservative media, where vaccine skeptics and election deniers host her and hail her as a whistleblower who, in their telling, is exposing mainstream media cover-ups. In interviews in recent weeks, she has taken aim at a range of seemingly unrelated targets — railing against “open border ideologues” and the United Nations bureaucrats she accuses of supporting them, so-called smart meters that record energy consumption in homes, and activists working to reverse climate change, which she has called “another load of B.S.”
Though she expresses views that are hard right today, some former CBS News colleagues recalled that her politics were not always easy to pigeonhole as conservative when they worked together. One said that Ms. Logan, who was raised in South Africa, once expressed dismay at the prevalence of guns in the United States and said she did not understand the affinity that many Americans have for the Second Amendment. She spoke with pride about her family when she described them as dedicated opponents of apartheid, they said.
Ms. Logan in 2005, reviewing footage from Iraq with her producer at the time, Josh Yager, right, at CBS’s studio in Manhattan. Credit... Ruth Fremson/ The New York Times
Several who worked alongside her said her fearlessness in war zones was double-edged — it produced some good television but also sometimes made them question her judgment. On occasion, they said, she led her producers and crew into situations that they thought were not worth the risk. Some cameramen refused to work with her, one of the former colleagues added, and she could be dismissive of the security teams the network hired to keep its journalists safe.
One former CBS producer who worked with her, Peter Klein, said in an interview that the structure of a large newsroom was a moderating influence. “There’s a system in place in newsrooms that offer checks and balances,” said Mr. Klein, founder of the Global Reporting Centre in British Columbia, a nonprofit. “Most of us need that system — but she really needed that system. And we knew that from the beginning,” he said.
“Now she’s just unfiltered,” Mr. Klein added.
The former CBS journalists said that spending more than a decade reporting from war zones started to take its toll on her emotionally, as it would on almost anyone repeatedly subjected to the trauma of combat. And they said they noticed a considerable change in her demeanor — seemingly more paranoid at times, erratic and deferential to her military sources — after she was sexually assaulted in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2011. In that attack, a mob of men grabbed her, separated her from her crew and tore off her clothes in what she described as a “merciless” attack. She was hospitalized for several days.
The next year, Ms. Logan gave a speech that would presage her downfall at CBS. The American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, had just been attacked, killing four Americans and igniting a firestorm among Republicans who accused Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton, the secretary of state at the time, of underestimating the threat terrorists posed to Americans.
Sounding more like an advocate for the military than a reporter, Ms. Logan told her audience in Chicago that she hoped the government was getting ready to deploy its “best clandestine warriors” to “exact revenge.” The world should know, she added, that the United States would not be attacked and then “stand by and do nothing about it.” And she accused the Obama administration of playing down the threat from the Taliban, and of lying “about who they really are.”
Then, about a year later, she began telling people she was working on a story that “was going to blow the lid off Benghazi,” according to one person’s recollection.
Ms. Logan appeared on a “60 Minutes’” segment on Oct. 27, 2013, about the attack on the United States Special Mission in Benghazi, Libya. The report was later retracted. Credit...CBS
The story she came up with was the kind of work known inside “60 Minutes” somewhat dismissively as a “book report” because it was based in part on a forthcoming book. Ms. Logan interviewed the author, a security contractor stationed in Libya, who said in a segment that aired on Oct. 27, 2013, that he had helped defend the compound on the night of the attack. He described in harrowing detail how he came face to face with the enemy.
The New York Times reported several weeks later that the contractor had, in fact, told the F.B.I. that he was not inside the compound that night. After initially defending Ms. Logan and the report, CBS News retracted it and apologized. Ms. Logan and her producer were placed on a leave of absence, and she acknowledged having made a “disappointing” mistake.
The network’s chief and executive producer of “60 Minutes” at the time, Jeffrey Fager, later called the story “the worst mistake on my 10-year watch.”
Ms. Logan quietly left the network in 2018 after her contract expired. In a defamation lawsuit she filed in 2019 against New York magazine over a 2014 profile she claimed had harmed her ability to find other work, she said CBS cut her salary to $750,000 in 2015 from $2,150,000 in 2014. (A federal judge dismissed the case.) She moved from Washington to the Hill Country of Texas with her husband and children, a relocation she told People magazine in 2016 allowed her to focus more on being a mother, especially to her son with a learning disability.
Ms. Logan’s banishment from mainstream media has hardly restricted her access to the center of gravity in the Republican Party.
This month, she made a trip to Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s Florida estate, for a screening of a new film by the conservative author Dinesh D’Souza. Other guests included General Flynn, Rudolph W. Giuliani, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, and Kyle Rittenhouse, the man acquitted of murdering two people during a political demonstration that turned violent in Kenosha, Wis., in 2020. As guests mingled on the grounds, Mr. Rittenhouse stopped to have his picture taken with Ms. Logan.
A correction was made on May 22, 2022: An earlier version of a caption in this article misstated Lara Logan’s affiliation with Fox News. She was employed and then let go from a production company that did work for Fox Nation, a streaming service for Fox News. She was not directly employed by Fox News. When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at [email protected].
Jeremy W. Peters covers media and its intersection with politics, law and culture. He is the author of “Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted.”
