Lee Smith: The Russiagate Crime is Still In Progress

His article is both a review of the Fusion GPS book, Crime in Progress, trying to sway their upcoming juries and on the media's eager participation in the conspiracy.

Then again, -the Fusion GPS book's] intended audience is not the public, but the large ensemble of media operatives who helped stage Russiagate. Crime in Progress is a promptbook in case the players blow their lines, especially now the spotlight is on their unsuccessful performances.

The anti-Trump plotters are under new pressures from US attorney John Durham’s criminal investigation and the Department of Justice report on FISA abuses in the FBI investigation. These implicate as lawbreakers not only former senior officials, but also the media accomplices who facilitated crimes by leaking classified information.

Durham's investigation and the DOJ inspector general’s audit probably won't convince journalists to reassess the Trump-Russia narrative in which they have invested the prestige and fortunes of the media. But there are signs that the media is starting to feel the cost of dumping poison into the information ecosystem.
Large parts of the public say they struggle to judge the big events shaping their lives. With impeachment in the news, readers and viewers confess they do not know whether there is merit to the allegations that Trump bribed or extorted the Ukrainian president, or to whatever charges Representative Adam Schiff & Co. are cooking up to dirty Trump before the 2020 election.

The New York Times touchingly reports a reader's complaint: 'I don't know that '’m getting the facts from the media right now.' But the journalists can't imagine why Americans say they’re in the dark. The Washington Post's media columnist Margaret Sullivan even blames the public for no longer trusting outlets like hers, which published Fusion GPS's Trump-Russia nonsense. For the philosophers at Vox, it’s 'tribal epistemology', or listening only to your own side -- which explains why, after three years of Russiagate, news consumers are not falling for Ukrainegate.

It wasn't Fox News that spent $40 million and hired dozens of DOJ lawyers and FBI agents for a special counsel investigation that found no evidence of collusion. It was former FBI director Robert Mueller. It's hardly breaking news that much of the US public distrusts an openly politicized press. What's changed is that half of America has seen evidence that the media participated in a political operation to topple the president they elected.

Team Collusion's strategy is to keep feeding exculpatory fan fiction into the news cycle so as to discredit the inspector general's report and Durham’s investigation as politicized attacks on upright public servants. Selling this narrative requires unit cohesion.

Read the whole thing. He notes that the Fusion GPS book is the latest effort at enforcing unit cohesion among his media propaganda arm.

And, by the way, always remember that Fusion GPS has admitted that it straight-up pays "journalists," but won't say which ones it pays.

It claims it pays these "journalists" for " " " " " research " " " " " but I suspect the money is really being paid to get these "journalists" to write up Fusion's fictions in the press.

It may not be an explicit quid pro quo transaction. It may be more like: The reporter wants to do favors for Fusion GPS because every three months Fusion pays them for a very easy make-work " " " " research " " " " job, and so when Fusion asks them to plant one of their conspiracy theory fictions, they naturally want to please the guy giving them money.

Giving them money, ostensibly for other reasons.

But come on -- when you're on the take, you're on the take.

And in addition to the let's-pretend-this-isn't-straight-bribery angle: I have to imagine many (most?) of our despicable, morally rotten Marxist-but-greedy press corps would just straight up take Fusion money to plant smears and write absurd defenses of them, with no need of any pretense or CYA plausible deniability.

posted by Ace at 03:37 PM

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