More on Fusion GPS: Veteran Washington Reporter Says Media Won't Report on Fusion GPS' Activities as a Major "Source" of "News," Because If You Dug Down Into It and Saw Fusion GPS' Emails With the Media, "It will look like an apocalypse"

A startling Q&A from Grassley and Browder, who testified today about the Magnitsky Act, Putin's efforts to overturn it, and Fusion GPS' role in helping Putin overturn it:

Lindsey Graham notes that Fusion GPS was both behind the anti-Trump Pee Pee Party Dossier as well as being on the same team as whoever set up the Don Jr. meeting.

Mollie Hemingway digests Browyard's testimony.

The full testimony is here, and I strongly advise you to read it. It's gripping as hell.

It's also alarming -- not just about the incredible brutality, venality, and corruption of the Russian government, but the even more frightening Shadow Media in the US which takes money from corrupt governments to get stories friendly to them planted in US media accounts, or to kill stories they don't like.

This tweet also has some of the highlights.

Lee Smith also checks in and digests the accusations flying about Fusion GPS. This is amazing stuff.

I'm not going to get into the details -- you'll have to click for those; this all seems very scary to me, scary enough I don't even want to mention this stuff -- but here's Lee Smith's conclusion:

It’s one of the peculiar paradoxes of the media today that the firm that sparked the anti-Trump resistance, and fueled the patriotism of those newly awakened to the dangers of Russian interference in American political institutions is working with companies intimately linked with Moscow. Fusion GPS is working to undo the U.S. sanctions on Russia implemented by the Magnitzky Act, and has been networked into Gazprom’s investment in Venezuela’s energy sector alongside Derwick Associates. And yet the U.S. media is focused on the Great Kremlin Conspiracy, the fruit of what appears to be only one in a series of smear campaigns waged by Fusion GPS. Sure, the reasons are partly ideological—Trump is not the press’ preferred candidate. And financial—the daily campaign against Trump is driving traffic that print and broadcast haven’t seen in a long time.

The press has its hands tied. “If they report that the Russia dossier is probably nonsense,” said Halvorssen, “and Fusion GPS is running information operations across the media, then that calls into question all the other stories that Fusion GPS has fed journalists in the past. Why are so few journalists willing to look into Fusion GPS?”

In order to report honestly on the Trump scandals, a weakened press would have to report honestly on Fusion GPS—which would mean lifting the lid on the incompetence and malfeasance of their own institutions and colleagues, which would reveal a scandal as threatening to democracy as anything Trump has said or done. “Imagine if they subpoena Fusion GPS’s emails,” said a veteran Washington reporter, “there are going to be lots of journalists in there who’ve taken stories from them. Big names, senior figures in the field. It will look like an apocalypse.”

There was a Mamet film about ten years ago called Spartan. It was okay. But what was great about it was its deadpan depiction of the US as a country in which government thugs and quasi-government thugs killed and assaulted people with impunity. Not just impunity -- they didn't even worry about it much. They acted as if this was all routine, not exceptional at all.

I'm starting to get that kind of vibe from all this.

posted by Ace at 06:10 PM

| Access Comments