Who knows what will happen but it sure would be interesting if the head of ABC’s sister network get indicted. I would like to hear the tape of Ailes telling Judith Regan to lie to federal investigators about Bernie Kerik.
Jailhouse Fox
by DougJ| 47 Comments
This post is in: Going Galt, Our Failed Media Experiment
aimai
Na Ga Hoppen. They locked up poor Martha Stewart but then, she was a democrat. Ailes will never even receive a polite inquiry.
aimai
Mary G
It’s nice to think about, but it’s based on what some guy at an airport heard another guy say – link
Mary G
Trying to link again.
Mattminus
An indictment against Ailes would be like eleventymillion Xmases rolled into one for Fox.
Poopyman
@Mattminus: True. They live to be “victimized”.
Mike Kay (Peacemaker)
Do jail cells come in his size?
soonergrunt
Roger Ailes is going to skate on this, because he is like Charlie Sheen. We can’t process him with a normal brain.
lllphd
waaay OT here, and i apologize, doug, as this is a really important issue, this ailes matter. however, check this out.
the afl-cio website is reporting from their person on the ground in madison that walker and the repugs are welding windows shut so protesters inside can’t have food passed to them
atrios first posted it, but the link would not budge; lots o’ traffic no doubt. however, if you go to the afl-cio website, the link is in the middle of the front page, and i got thru that way.
this is pretty damn over the top walker had already cleared with his over the top behaviors.
Elizabelle
From Mary G’s link, a Salon story:
===========
I would expect Ailes to be highly litigious if this story does not pan out.
Rather a risk for Ritholz to pass along on a blog? Or protected, in that he’s made clear it’s hearsay and nothing more?
My fingers crossed that it’s true …
Corner Stone
Kerik is a Bush Era fooforaw.
Look forward DougJ.
lllphd
honestly, don’t have time to fight with the edit feature here (pretty much sucks), so here is the quote from the afl-cio blog:
Mike Kay (Peacemaker)
If Ailes is indicted, it will be major blow to fox news’ brand of being impartial.
lllphd
ok, it screwed it up again. the entire thing i just posted, save the first graf, is a direct quote from the afl-cio blog.
your blockquote feature really should be able to manage more than one graf at a time. sheez.
beltane
While we’re dreaming, lets make sure Roger Ailes shares a prison cell with Qaddafi. That would be epic.
Egypt Steve
I wonder what the charge would be, if true? Obstruction of justice?
Keith
I would love to see how Fox would cover that story (probably like a political opponent)
beltane
@lllphd: So it appears that Scott Walker wants to turn this into a hunger strike. It’s been a long time since the labor movement has had martyrs.
I imagine teabaggers don’t do hunger strikes, though from the looks of them it wouldn’t be a bad idea.
Zifnab
@Mattminus:
Nah. FOX Nuts likes being the targeter, not the targetie. They’ll play the victim card defensively, sure. But Ailes isn’t going to want to get thrown into the lime-light himself. He sure as hell isn’t going to want to drop millions on lawyers and scurry back and forth between court appearances when he could be yachting and golfing with his executive buddies.
Ailes will try to end this ASAP if it does manage to crop up. Nobody at FOX really benefits from an indictment.
Mike Kay (Peacemaker)
I just hope Geraldo wasn’t involve, his loss would devastate Fox News’ professionalism.
Corner Stone
@Keith:
Right up til the day he’s convicted they would be slamming the criminilization of politics angle like Tom DeLay et al.
Then after Ailes’ is convicted it would be, “Today, Democrat Roger Ailes was convicted of…”
JPL
@lllphd: Here’s a link from the Madison Newspaper.
MikeJ
@soonergrunt:
New edition of cats quoting Charlie Sheen.
Sadly, no cats quoting New Edition.
Uloborus
@Corner Stone:
I’m cracking up. ‘You have to see this as a game changer, don’t you? Roger Ailes was one of the leading liberals in he media, the man trying to censor Hannity and Beck. And now we find out he was concealing evidence from the FBI? After a wake-up call like that, no one can deny how corrupt and ruthless the liberal infiltration of the media is.’
Pooh
Way OT, but the crackdown appears to have begun in Madison.
JPL
@Pooh:
Illphid at 11 mentioned it and I posted a link to the paper at 21
Jay C
Heh. I really like Barry Ritholz’s blog: but his comment section has the best disclaimer/header I’ve seen in a while: it should be made a standard for the blogosphere:
Pooh
@JPL: Yeah, saw that. Literally welding the windows shut would be so fucked.
Poopyman
@MikeJ: Also, to quote the first comment:
Poopyman
You know, the fire dept is going to take a very dim view of welded–shut windows. This won’t last.
Elizabelle
@beltane:
Maybe not hunger strikes, but it would be interesting to see some Teabaggers off their (government-provided) meds.
geg6
@lllphd:
If you put two underscores between paragraphs, it will blockquote correctly.
Comrade Mary
It should last long enough for the fire chief to call Walker a would-be murderer. Of course, national media wouldn’t cover it, but maybe local media would.
geg6
@Poopyman:
Agreed. I’m thinking the fire marshall will have something to say about this ASAP.
Meanwhile, I’m also thinking that Roger Ailes is wishing like hell he’d never heard of Judith Regan.
lllphd
update on madison:
not quite so nefarious:
I’m hearing that a window latch simply needed repair, and that a women’s room latch was always screwed shut. So this may not be quite so nefarious.
except that the rest of the lockdown news is pretty awful.
catclub
Remember Fitzmas?, and all the happy hoping on indictments there?
I predict even less happiness in a potential indictment of Roger Ailes than actually resulted (nearly zero) in that case.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Even if there is an indictment, enjoy it while it lasts folks. The trial will be short. I predict the transcript will read something like this:
[Defense atty, rising to give the opening statement]:
Your honor, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my client is accused of urging others to lie to federal investigators. This accusation falls to the ground on one very basic and undeniable fact: my client is completely unable to distinguish fact from fancy, lies from truth, honesty from mendacity, hence he cannot have urged anyone else to lie, because he does not grasp the concept of lying.
To support this claim, I will introduce into evidence the entire corpus of Fox News Corp content which was created and broadcast under my client’s supervision and management…
[audible gasps from the audience]
…and for the sake of brevity, we will limit ourselves to the period from 2000 through 2010. By my rough calculations, and subtracting out commericial advertising and dead air time, this will amount to approximately 44,000 hours of taped evidence…
[Shouts of ‘No!’, and ‘monster!’. The judge and prosecuting atty look ill. Two of the jurors faint.]
…or if you prefer, I move that this trial be immediately…
[Judge bangs gavel]: Trial dismissed!
ppcli
@catclub: I wouldn’t shed any tears for Ailes if he were to be indicted and convicted. But I don’t see what he is going to be charged with. I know suborning perjury can get you jail time, but he wasn’t urging her to lie on the stand, right? Is there also a law against suborning “lies to federal investigators”? Or is it some kind of conspiracy thing? I’d appreciate if one of the local lawyers could fill me in.
Also, I think pigs will fly before Ailes sees jail time for this. I mean jeez, he just urged her to mislead the feds about the man who was on the fast track to becoming fracking *Head of Homeland Security*, after all. It’s not as if he was suggesting lying in the course of a fishing expedition set up as a perjury trap in an unrelated civil case, or anything massively important like that.
R-Jud
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: If this were Gawker, my comment would just be this gif right here.
geg6
@ppcli:
http://www.federalcriminallawyer.us/2010/12/17/truth-and-falsity-in-federal-prosecutions-for-making-a-false-statement/
Yes, it’s a crime to lie to a federal agent. Punishable by up to 5 years in federal prison.
Arclite
Doug,
Roger Ailes is providing a patriotic service to his country. He did what he thought was right at the time. We must look forward, not back.
Awaiting Glenn Greenwald missile strike from Brazil in 10, 9, 8…
lllphd
ok, the shenanigans in WI may well be as nefarious as expected; why are we not surprised:
http://thinkprogress.org/2011/02/28/three-tax-loopholes-wisconsin/
scroll down to the photo update.
ppcli
@geg6: Yes, I know that. But Ailes wasn’t lying to a federal agent, was he? He was urging someone else to lie. That isn’t addressed in the link you gave.
Cain
@beltane:
I expect to see a lot of santorum on the prison floor.
cain
Mike in NC
Roger Ailes manages to make Bernie Kerik look like an honest man.
Shoemaker-Levy 9
This story doesn’t make much sense. The existence of this recording has been known for, what, five years? Why would it now, out of the blue, result in an indictment? And we’ve never heard a word about a possible criminal case until now?
I think this is just porn for liberals, but it’s fun to dream.
skippy
number 47 said to number 3
there’s gonna be a party and it’s full of tea
he lies and distorts so easily
but it wont be so easy when he’s down on his knee
it’s fox! everbody it’s fox!
everybody on the old cell blocks
gonna have a piece of jailhouse fox!
Dr. Squid
@ppcli: That charge against Clinton was what Roger Ailes built an entire network around.