The coroner’s office had yet to identify the victim, but both Rolling Stone and BuzzFeed, where Hastings worked most recently, reported that it was him.
The solo-vehicle crash happened near the intersection of Highland and Melrose avenues around 4:15 a.m., according to the LAPD.
Hastings’ Mercedes-Benz slammed into a tree and caught fire.
“I was just coming northbound on Highland and I seen a car going really fast, and all of a sudden I seen it jackknife,” said Luis Cortez, who witnessed the wreck.
“I just seen parts fly everywhere and I slammed on my brakes and stopped and tried to call 911,” Cortez added.
The engine of the vehicle was found in a yard about 100 feet away.
The driver was pronounced dead at the scene. Coroner’s officials said the body was too badly burned to make an immediate identification.
[...]
Friends said that, because of the nature of Hastings’ work, he often led a very paranoid lifestyle.
“A lot of his friends were worried that he was in a very agitated state, yes. No question, people were concerned,” said Cenk Uygur, host of “The Young Turks.”
“He was incredibly tense and very worried and was concerned that the government was looking in on his material,” he said.
“I don’t know what his state of mind was at 4:30 in the morning, but I do know what his state of mind was in general, and it was a nervous wreck.”
KTLA
Hastings gained national attention in 2010 after exposing inflammatory comments made by Gen. Stanley McChrystal about President Barack Obama and the civilian leadership of the military.
Rolling Stone, which employed Hastings as a contributing editor, praised him Tuesday as a “fearless journalist” who sought out hard stories and refused to “cozy up to power.”
Raw Story
"He was alone in a brand new Mercedes."Besides Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, most Democrats abandoned their civil liberty positions during the age of Obama. With a new leak investigation looming, the Democrat leadership are now being forced to confront all the secrets they’ve tried to hide.
For most bigwig Democrats in Washington, D.C., the last 48 hours has delivered news of the worst kind — a flood of new information that has washed away any lingering doubts about where President Obama and his party stand on civil liberties, full stop.
Glenn Greenwald’s exposure of the NSA’s massive domestic spy program has revealed the entire caste of current Democratic leaders as a gang of civil liberty opportunists, whose true passion, it seems, was in trolling George W. Bush for eight years on matters of national security.
[...]
[The] two notable exception to this rule are Senator Ron Wyden, from Oregon, and Sen. Mark Udall from Colorado, who had seemed to be fighting a largely lonely, frustrating battle against Obama’s national security state.
[...]
The state of affairs, in other words, is so grave that two sitting Senators went as close as they could to violating their unconstitutional security oaths in order to warn the country of information that otherwise would not have been declassified until April of 2038, according to the Verizon court order obtained by Greenwald.
[...]
Outside of Washington, D.C., the frustration that Wyden and Udall have felt has been exponentially magnified. Transparency supporters, whistleblowers, and investigative reporters, especially those writers who have aggressively pursued the connections between the corporate defense industry and federal and local authorities involved in domestic surveillance, have been viciously attacked by the Obama administration and its allies in the FBI and DOJ.
[...]
Perhaps more information will soon be forthcoming.
Michael Hastings’ last article
"It sounded like a bomb. It woke me up. My whole house shook."
Are they making Mercedes Benzes shoddy these days? Just asking.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/journalist-michael-hastings-killed-car-crash-article-1.1376574
UPDATE: 6/23 - Don't be so quick to call me a conspiracy theorist.
UPDATE: 8/17 - Follow-up
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