Republican operative who reached out to Russia for Hillary Clinton hacked emails committed suicide.

Courtesy of TPM: 

Peter W. Smith, the Republican operative who sought to obtain and publicize emails he thought were stolen from Hillary Clinton’s private server, committed suicide days after he told a reporter about his efforts, according to the Chicago Tribune. 

The Chicago Tribune reported Thursday night, citing a Minnesota state death record filed in Olmsted County, that Smith killed himself on May 14 days after he talked to the Wall Street Journal about his hunt for Clinton’s emails. That account was also included in a medical examiner’s report and a Rochester police report, according to the Tribune. 

Smith left a statement police referred to as a suicide note, according to the report, in which he said there was “NO FOUL PLAY WHATSOEVER” involved in his death.

"No Foul Play Whatsoever." Who leaves a suicide note like that?

Yeah nothing suspicious about THAT.

This would have been the big story today, if not for that revelation about additional Russians involved in the Trump Junior meeting.

And as far as I'm concerned he certainly deserves more attention from the media.

Trump supporter caught on video openly discussing plans to suppress votes for Hillary Clinton.

Trump supporter Jesse Benton.

Courtesy of the Telegraph: 

Supporters of Donald Trump are engaging in a "voter suppression" strategy under which pro-Clinton "African Americans and suburban mums" are being persuaded not to vote, a campaigner told undercover Telegraph reporters. 

A senior figure involved in funding efforts to support the billionaire’s campaign against Hillary Clinton boasted of how activists had adopted a scheme to “try to drop her turn-out two or three points” in key areas of the country. 

Jesse Benton, who described himself as a “consultant” to the Great America PAC, said the strategy involved “trying to take their taste for her away."

The disclosure appears to confirm suspicions that pro-Trump campaigners have been deliberately focusing on dissuading groups of Clinton supporters from voting.

By the way this is not an exaggeration by the reporters at the Telegraph, they literally have this Benton guy saying the words "voter suppression."

Nor is he the only Trump supporter planning this kind of thing.

Courtesy of HuffPo:

Vote Protectors, the anti-voter-fraud group hosted by Donald Trump ally and political dirty trickster Roger Stone, plans to send volunteers to monitor polling places in nine cities with high minority populations on Election Day, Stone said last week. Untrained poll-watchers have intimidated voters in previous elections. But Vote Protectors is going further than its predecessors. 

Stone’s group created an official-looking ID badge for its volunteers to wear, and its volunteers planned to videotape voters and conduct fake “exit polls,” efforts that election experts say risks intimidating and confusing voters. Or at least that’s what the group was planning to do before The Huffington Post asked Stone about it on Tuesday. The controversial Trump ally, long known for his bare-knuckled political tactics, said that key proposals on his group’s websites were there without his knowledge, and assured HuffPost that he would operate within the confines of election law. 

Stone had initially refused to explain just how Vote Protectors planned to accomplish its goals. 

I think is called "rigging the election" which is exactly what Donald Trump has accused Hillary Clinton and the media of doing. 

Projection baby, it's all about projection.

Roger Ailes used part of the Fox News budget to fund a "black room" dedicated to digging up dirt on his enemies.

Courtesy of New York Magazine:

According to one highly-placed source, Solivan worked out of what Fox insiders called “the Black Room,” an operation Ailes established around 2011 to conduct PR and surveillance campaigns against people he targeted both inside and outside the company. The “Black Room” was located on the 14th floor of the News Corp building at 1211 Avenue of the Americas, a quiet part of the office that housed Fox News Latino and some marketing and promotions employees. Fox employees Ken LaCorte and Jim Pinkerton, veteran political operatives who’ve worked with Ailes since the 1980s, also worked with Solivan, the source said, adding that Ailes’s personal lawyer, and Fox contributor, Peter Johnson Jr. advised the team. (In an email, Peter Johnson denied any involvement in “Black Room” campaigns, saying, “The only online campaign I’m aware of is yours attempting to create a truth from a fiction with this account.”) 

Targets of the campaigns included journalists John Cook and Hamilton Nolan, who have aggressively covered Ailes for Gawker. According to one source, private detectives followed Cook around his Brooklyn neighborhood and Fox operatives prepared a report on him with information they intended to leak to blogs. (According to the source, one proposed line of attack claimed that Cook — whose wife, Slate news director Allison Benedikt, is Jewish — was anti-Semitic.) “I’m honored to be among Roger Ailes’s enemies,” Cook said.

Ailes also used those resources to go after local journalists, Andrea Mackris (Who accused Bill O'Reilly of sexual harassment, and the author of this New York Magazine article, Gabriel Sherman, just to name a few.

I would not be at all surprised to learn that Ailes also used them to attack journalists or bloggers who reported negatively on other on air "talent," such as Sean Hannity, Eric Bolling, and of course Sarah Palin.

(Gee, that might help to explain who paid those assholes to make up stuff about me and put in on the web back in 2009.)

I have a feeling that this is just the tip of the iceberg over at Fox News and that the really terrible stuff  concerning Roger Ailes and others is still waiting to be uncovered.