Fusion Collusion: They All Come Tumbling Down

Lee Smith is getting sick and tired of always being right.

The question of why everyone got the same big scoop on the same day--only to find that the story was totally wrong--is a thread that leads to some very interesting places. So let's follow it.

CNN claimed that an email sent to Donald Trump and his campaign officials that linked to WikiLeaks documents was dated Sept. 4, 2016--therefore showing that WikiLeaks, and by implication the Kremlin, had offered the Trump campaign an exclusive preview of damaging Democratic National Committee emails. But in fact, the email was dated Sept. 14--10 days later--and linked to a trove of documents that WikiLeaks had publicly released a day earlier, meaning the big scoop proving Trump’s Russia ties was, in fact, a story about spam.

"Surely anyone who has any minimal concerns about journalistic accuracy," [Glenn] Greenwald continued, "which would presumably include all the people who have spent the last year lamenting Fake News, propaganda, Twitter bots and the like--would demand an accounting as to how a major U.S. media outlet ended up filling so many people's brains with totally false news."

....

This startling unconcern goes back at least as far as that big Washington Post "exclusive" in January about Russia hacking an electrical dam in Vermont--a story that was entirely false. Since then, it's all been downhill.

How many times has the media since promised the smoking gun that will finally and incontrovertibly prove that Donald Trump colluded with Russia to swing the Presidency away from Hillary Clinton? Boom! And then nothing. Poof.

When you repeatedly publish "news" that isn’t true, you’re no longer in the news business. Call it what you like—infotainment, media theater, crowd-sourced onanism, a human be-in—but it’s not "news," because it isn't true.

Read the whole thing. Lee Smith floats the possibility that someone investigating leaks on the House Intelligence Committee themselves put the emails into a suspected leaker's hands -- with an erroneous date -- to flush the leaker out (a scenario I read about in a Tom Clancy book, probably Red Storm Rising -- put some catnip out that a leaker can't help but leak and then you catch your leaker).

I've heard that and thought about it and talked about it with people. The problem, I think, is that an agency providing these emails to Congress cannot alter the date to flush out the leaker, who I'm not saying is Adam Schiff or anything, without being himself guilty of the crime of submitting deliberately false documents to Congress.

Unless there's some special legal exception for this kind of smoke-out-the-leaker operation, which I seriously doubt, because who in Congress would ever vote to approve that?

Nevertheless, the whole piece is worth a read, linking the whole garbage media to FusionGPS and the real shadow government that runs everything.

posted by Ace at 01:22 PM

| Access Comments