{"id":186243,"date":"2014-03-25T20:58:00","date_gmt":"2014-03-26T01:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/03\/25\/if-i-were-glenn-greenwald-id-watch-my-back-around-pierre-omidyar\/"},"modified":"2014-03-25T20:58:00","modified_gmt":"2014-03-26T01:58:00","slug":"if-i-were-glenn-greenwald-id-watch-my-back-around-pierre-omidyar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/03\/25\/if-i-were-glenn-greenwald-id-watch-my-back-around-pierre-omidyar\/","title":{"rendered":"If I Were Glenn Greenwald, I’d Watch My Back Around Pierre Omidyar"},"content":{"rendered":"

A while back Mark Ames wrote of the ties<\/a> between the founder of First Media<\/i>, who now employs Glenn Greenwald, and the CIA and State Department’s clandestine activities to destabilize the Ukraine.<\/p>\n

Now, Paul Carr follows up with an analysis of Pierre and Pamela Omidyar\u2019s pattern of regular  visits to the Obama White House<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Speaking to the Daily Beast, documentary maker Jeremy Scahill mentioned<\/a> his boss explicitly when comparing the cozy relationship between other news organizations and the White House. First Look, he insisted, would be different\u2026<\/span>

<\/span><\/p>\n

I think that the White House, whether it is under Republican or Democrat, they pretty much now [sic] who they are dealing with. There are outlets like The Daily Beast, or The Huffington Post that have risen up in the past decade, but they are very quickly just becoming part of the broader mainstream media, and with people that have spent their careers working for magazines or newspapers or what have you, and the White House believes they all speak the language on these things. With us, because we want to be adversarial, they won\u2019t know what bat phone to call. They know who to call at The Times, they know who to call at The Post. With us, who are they going to call? Pierre? Glenn?\u201d <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Scahill\u2019s question is a good one \u2014 and it\u2019s also very easy to answer: If the White House has a problem with First Look, it\u2019s a pretty safe bet they\u2019ll pick up the phone and call Pierre Omidyar.<\/span>

<\/span>After all, according to records<\/a> made available under Obama\u2019s 2009 transparency commitment<\/a>, Omidyar has visited the Obama White House at least half a dozen times since 2009. During the same period, his wife, Pamela Omidyar, who heads Omidyar Network, has visited 1600 Pennsylvania Ave at least four times, while Omidyar Network\u2019s managing partner, Matthew Bannick, has visited a further three. In all, senior Omidyar Network officials made at least 13 visits to the White House between 2009-2013. (In fact the logs indicate that, on several occasions, Omidyar visited the White House more than once in the same day. To avoid unfairly inflating the numbers, I\u2019ve removed same-day duplicates from all the totals cited in this article.)<\/span>

<\/span>To put the numbers in perspective, Omidyar\u2019s six visits compare to four visits during the same period by NBCUniversal chief Stephen Burke, two by Fox News boss Roger Ailes, two by MSNBC\u2019s Phil Griffin, one by New York Times owner Arthur O Sulzberger, and one each by Dow Jones\u2019 Robert Thompson, Gannett\/USA Today\u2019s Gracia Martore and Omidyar\u2019s fellow tech billionaire turned media owner, Jeff Bezos.<\/span>

<\/span>In fact Pando could only find three media titans who had earned more White House visitor loyalty points than Omidyar: CNN\u2019s Jeffrey Zucker (7), former Post owner Donald Graham (9) and queen of all media, Arianna Huffington (11). According to records, neither The Daily Beast\u2019s Tina Brown or Barry Diller were invited at all \u2014 nor, by the way, was Rupert Murdoch.<\/span>

<\/span>Even compared to other major tech leaders, Omidyar is a special case. LinkedIn\u2019s Reid Hoffman visited the White House twice during the same period, as did Facebook\u2019s Mark Zuckerberg. Omidyar also beat out Marissa Mayer (5), Eric Schmidt (5), John Doerr (4), Dick Costolo (3), Evan Williams (3), Jack Dorsey (2), Larry Ellison (1) and poor old Reed Hastings who wasn\u2019t invited at all, until this week<\/a>. According to records, other people not important enough to make it through the door include Pando investors Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel.<\/span>

<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span>Serbia, Georgia and Burma are, of course, all places where USAID-backed pro-US color revolutions were successful. And now we have Omidyar Network investing in USAID\u2019s newest overseas programs, \u201cadvancing U.S. national security interests\u201d in USAID\u2019s words.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Carr reveals Omidyar’s extensive and ongoing ties to the US state security apparatus’ involvement in the intelligence operations, Scahill says that Omidyar is aggressively involved with the day to day operations of First Media<\/i>‘s magazine, The Intercept<\/i>, “Pierre writes more on our internal messaging than anyone else.”<\/p>\n

This is not proof that Omidyar is somehow in cahoots with the CIA or the Obama administration, but it does mean that neither Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, Dan Froomkin, nor Matt Taibbi should trust him any further than they could throw him.<\/p>\n

As James Reisen of the New York Times<\/i> observed, the Obama administration, is “The Greatest Enemy Of Press Freedom That We Have Encountered In At Least a Generation<\/a>.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A while back Mark Ames wrote of the ties between the founder of First Media, who now employs Glenn Greenwald, and the CIA and State Department’s clandestine activities to destabilize the Ukraine. Now, Paul Carr follows up with an analysis of Pierre and Pamela Omidyar\u2019s pattern of regular  visits to the Obama White House: Speaking …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,1002,1102,1129,978],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-good-writing","category-intelligence","category-journalism","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186243"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186243\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}