Part I of this article showed a conspiracy to smear Donald Trump with false allegations of collusion with Russia took place, with Hillary Clinton at its head. Part II today will show the FBI was an active participant in the conspiracy to destroy Trump. The facts are not in dispute. We are left only to decide if the FBI acted incompetently and unprofessionally, or as part of a conspiracy.

The first part of the smoking gun may have been hiding in plain sight for some time now. In June 2018 Inspector General for the Department of Justice Michael Horowitz released his report on the FBI’s Clinton email investigation, including FBI Director Comey’s drafting of a press release announcing no prosecution for Clinton, written before the full investigation was even complete. In a damning passage, Horowitz found it was “extraordinary and insubordinate for Comey to conceal his intentions from his superiors… for the admitted purpose of preventing them from telling him not to make the statement, and to instruct his subordinates in the FBI to do the same.”

Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Comey’s boss, is criticized for meeting privately with Bill Clinton as the FBI investigation into Hillary unfolded. “Lynch’s failure to recognize the appearance problem… and to take action to cut the visit short was an error in judgment.” Lynch then doubled-down, refusing to recuse herself from the Clinton case, creating “public confusion.”

The report also criticizes FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who exchanged texts disparaging Trump before moving from the Clinton email to the Russiagate investigation. Those texts sowed public doubt about the investigation, including one exchange that read, “Page: “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Strzok: “No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.” Another Strzok document stated “we know foreign actors obtained access to some Clinton emails, including at least one secret message,” thought that was never prosecuted.

Page and Strzok also discussed cutting back the number of investigators present for Clinton’s in-person interview in light of the fact she might soon be president, and thus their new boss. Someone identified only as Agent One went on to refer to Clinton as “the President” and in a message told a friend “I’m with her.” The FBI also allowed Clinton’s lawyers to attend her interview, even though they were also witnesses to  possible crimes committed by Clinton.

If that does not add up to a smoking gun that the FBI conspired pre-dossier to help Hillary Clinton, how about this?

Following Hillary’s exoneration over her emails and mishandling of classified information, the FBI launched its Crossfire Hurricane investigation into Trump-Russia, based in whole or large part on the infamous Christopher Steele dossier. The public now knows the dossier was paid for and stocked with falsehoods by the Clinton campaign. The unanswered questions from that investigation themselves comprise a second smoking gun of FBI conspiracy. For example:

— Why did the FBI not inquire into Steele’s sources and methods, which would have quickly revealed the information was wholly false? Why was the FBI unable to discover Steele (and later, Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann, who gave false info to the FBI about Trump and Alfa Bank) were double agents working for and paid by the Clinton campaign?

— When the FBI found the target of its first FISA warrant out of the dossier, Carter Page, was actually a paid CIA asset, why did they hide this information from the FISA court instead of dropping Page? Why did this not cause them to question the credibility of Steele, a master spy who couldn’t even identify his source was actually a CIA asset? Steele claimed the Russians offered Page an insanely huge bribe, billions of dollars, to end U.S. sanctions if Trump became president. Page clearly could never have played a significant role in ending sanctions. Why did the FBI find those statements credible enough to pursue the warrant?

— Why did the FBI cite an open-source press article by Michael Isikoff claiming Trump had Russian ties as part of its FISA warrant application against Page without finding out who Isikoff’s source was? The source of course was Christopher Steele, who was interviewed in a hotel room booked by Fusion GPS who was paid by Clinton. The FBI nonetheless claimed an article from Yahoo! corroborated the dossier, a cite unlikely to pass muster on an undergrad term paper. Were they really fooled?

— Why did the FBI not discover the dossier’s false claim Trump lawyer Michael Cohen visited Prague to meet with Russians? Robert Mueller was able to conclusively dismiss the report. Confirming Cohen in Prague would have been a cornerstone of the FBI’s larger case, but the matter was left open until Mueller.

— Why did the FBI not question Sussmann about the source of his DNS data, some of which came directly from inside the White House? Why would a private citizen have such information?

— When Sussmann, claiming to be a concerned citizen with White House DNS data, first approached the FBI, why was he assigned to meet with the FBI’s General Counsel, its lawyer, and not a case agent? Was something other than his information, such possibly FBI collusion with fraud, being validated?

— Why was the CIA investigation referral saying Hillary was behind Russiagate ignored by the FBI? The memo was addressed to Director James Comey, who claims he has no knowledge of it, and Peter Strzok, who should have been the action officer but did nothing?

— Why did Kevin Brock, the FBI’s former intelligence chief, say “The fact pattern that John Durham is methodically establishing shows what James Comey and Andrew McCabe likely knew from day one, that the Steele dossier was politically-driven nonsense created at the behest of the Clinton campaign. And yet they knowingly ran with its false information.”

— Despite the investigation being run by the FBI, why was it CIA Director John Brennan who briefed (LINK) Obama on the Hillary connection in July 2016 and not Comey?

If any of those questions seem kind of obvious, that is the point. The cover stories only had to hold for a short time, enough to infect the media, enough to make things seem plausible for the FBI. Team Clinton and its co-conspirators were so certain they would win the election they felt none of their tricks needed to stay hidden much past victory. The story is waist-deep rotten.

At this point you can believe the multiple ops paid for and run by Clinton people were uncoordinated events, or that they were part of the broad campaign Hillary was an active participant in, and about which John Brennan warned Barack Obama, and which the CIA warned the FBI, not knowing they were in on it. You can believe the FBI acted incompetently and unprofessionally (yet consistently, no breaks went Trump’s way), or as part of a conspiracy.

What you cannot do any more is pretend this did not happen, and that the person most involved came close to being elected president because of it. If you worry about democracy, worry about that.

In preparing this article, it was fascinating to review the many shameful articles written in 2016 and 2017, the crazy days when every hinted rumor was worth a Breaking! designator. But one piece stood out, from Forbes in 2017. Hillary denied paying for the dossier, and the truth — the campaign paid the law firm Perkins and Coie who paid Fusion GPS who paid Orbis who paid Steele — was not known. The Forbes journalist wrote “If ordered and paid for by Hillary Clinton associates, Russia Gate is turned on its head as collusion between Clinton operatives (not Trump’s) and Russian intelligence. Russia Gate becomes Hillary Gate.” The article went on to say how James Comey refused to comment on Fusion GPS and the dossier in May 2017. Comey by then knew the real story and remained silent, even as the press was still running with the idea the dossier had been paid for by anonymous Democratic donors. If only we’d known.

wemeantwell.com

We are looking for two smoking guns now in connection with Russiagate. Today’s Part I will show Hillary Clinton herself sat atop a large-scale conspiracy to use the tools of modern espionage to create and disseminate false information about Trump. Part II to follow will show the FBI was an active participant in that conspiracy.

In summer 2016 Hillary Clinton’s private email server and her improper handling of classified information was the political story. Consensus was the election was Hillary’s to lose, that her opponents in general and especially the Trump clown show, could not stop her. Despite the MSM’s heroic attempts to downplay the importance of the emails, the issue lingered in the public mind, often aided by Hillary’s own contradictory statements. The emails nagged at the Clinton campaign — her unsecured server lay exposed during her SecState trips to Russia and China, and the deepest fear was that her internal communications might appear one day on Wikileaks, ending her career.

Clinton fought back. The initial shot was fired on July 24, 2016 by campaign manager Robby Mook, who was the first to claim there was a quid pro quo between Trump and Russia. “It was very concerning last week that Donald Trump changed the Republican platform to become what some experts would regard as pro-Russian,” Mook said, referring to a false story from the GOP convention just a few days earlier. The New York Times sent up a warning flare to all MSM media the next day announcing Clinton was making the Trump-Russia allegation a “theme” of the campaign.  As if she knew just what was coming next, Hillary took that as her cue to claim the Russians were trying to destroy her campaign, a theme which soon morphed into the Russians were trying to help Trump. That soon became Trump and Putin were working in collusion to elect Trump as a Manchurian candidate.

A prime driver behind all this was a mysterious “dossier.” The jewel in the crown was a “pee tape,” blackmail, kompromat, Moscow held to control Trump. Word was a former MI-6 intelligence officer named Christopher Steele compiled the dossier, giving the whole thing credibility. America media openly speculated on Trump’s imminent arrest for treason, with Twitter aflutter with phrases like tik-tok, walls closing in, and the like. The FBI’s James Comey and CIA’s John Brennan briefed the newly-elected Trump on the dossier simultaneously with the full contents spilling into the media. Talk shifted to impeachment, alongside claims Hillary might still deserve to be president.

We know now the dossier was fiction. Steele’s raw information was provided by the Clinton campaign, with his chief source working for the Brookings Institute. Steele worked as a double-agent, feeding Clinton-paid for fake info to the FBI pretending he was an FBI informant with sources deep inside Mother Russia. The dossier was a product of the Clinton campaign.

We also now know the Clinton campaign, via one of its lawyers, Michael Sussmann, gathered Internet DNS data on Trump and used that to create a fully fictional story about Trump using a secret server connected to the Alfa Bank to communicate with his Russian “handlers.” Sussmann also peddled a false story about Russian smartphones connecting into the Trump White House. We know Sussmann hid his relationship to Clinton from the FBI, pretending to be a “concerned citizen.” Sussmann is under indictment by Special Counsel John Durham, and in his own defense filing does not dispute the basic facts. He only claims his lying was immaterial.

Both the dossier op and the DNS op were funded by Clinton campaign money laundered through its lawyers at Perkins Coie and then contractors Fusion GPS and Orbis. In both instances the false information created was peddled to the FBI (and CIA) by a Clinton-paid stooge pretending not to be affiliated with the campaign, Steele as an FBI informant and Sussmann as a “concerned citizen.” Both ops used a sophisticated information sub-op, feeding the media as if Steele and Sussmann were not the source and then having Steel and Sussmann step in to serve as anonymous confirmers, an inside loop. In both instances the FBI took the bait and opened unprecedented full-spectrum investigations into first Candidate Trump, and then President of the United States Trump.

Four years after all that, on October 6, 2020, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe declassified documents revealing then-CIA Director John Brennan briefed then-President Obama on or about July 28, 2016 on Hillary Clinton’s plan to tie Candidate Trump to Russia as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.

The highly-redacted document says “We’re getting additional insight into Russian activities from [REDACTED]. Cite alleged approved by Hillary Clinton on July 26 a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.”

Ratcliffe in 2020 also revealed in September 2016 the CIA forwarded to the FBI an investigative referral on Hillary Clinton approving “a plan concerning U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections in order to distract the public from her email scandal.”

The MSM at the time dismissed these two important disclosures as unverified disinformation. The problem with simply waving away these documents is the very high threshold for information to actually reach the president. Every day a near-infinate amount of information is collected by the CIA. A tiny percentage of that is culled for the standing Agency briefings the president receives. An even tinier subset is seen as important and credible enough to be personally briefed by the CIA Director face-to-face with the president.

Rarely is there near-time “verification” with intelligence. There is however “confidence,” how sure the CIA is the information is true, and the Director would not waste his boss’ time with that of low or medium confidence (and neither would the Agency do the same in sending its referral on to the FBI.) Knowing what we know now about Clinton campaign funding of the ops and Clinton personnel involvement, Brennan’s confidence is better understood. And it is important to remember Brennan openly supported Hillary; he was not the guy to dish dirt on her. He was making sure his boss, Barack Obama, had a heads up if the whole thing was ever exposed.

There is also the matter of Ratcliffe, who hand-selected the documents to declassify, lending them more credibility. Why play high stakes with information Radcliffe knew to be false?

One last concern has been that the CIA source appears to be foreign, and therefore suspect. The CIA is legally prohibited from spying on Americans in America, particularly something as sensitive as a presidential campaign. Even if tipped off by an American, the CIA would need to go overseas and recreate the info with a foreign source. That the information was available through a foreign source also suggests strongly Moscow had eyes on inside the Hillary campaign. Perhaps through her email?

Both ops ran on Clinton’s money and Clinton’s people. The smoking gun of Brennan’s notes ties it all to Hillary herself.

wemeantwell.com

It’s hard to believe that the last president spent his term pouring weapons into Ukraine, shredding treaties with Russia and ramping up cold war escalations against Moscow which helped lead us directly to the extraordinarily dangerous situation we now find ourselves in, and yet mainstream liberals spent his entire administration screaming that he was a Kremlin puppet.

A lot of anti-empire commentary is rightly going into criticizing how the Obama administration paved the way to this conflict in Ukraine with its role in the 2014 coup and support for Kyiv’s war against Donbass separatists. But what’s getting lost in all this, largely because Trumpites have been using their mainstream numbers to loudly amplify criticisms of the role of the Obama and Biden administrations in this mess, is what happened between those two presidencies which was just as crucial in getting us here.

Though it’s been scrubbed from mainstream liberal history, it was actually the Trump administration that began the US policy of arming Ukraine in the first place. Obama had refused forceful demands from neocons and liberal hawks to do so because he feared it would provoke an attack by Russia.

In a 2015 article titled “Defying Obama, Many in Congress Press to Arm Ukraine”, The New York Times reported that “So far, the Obama administration has refused to provide lethal aid, fearing that it would only escalate the bloodshed and give President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia a pretext for further incursions.”

For years, neocons and arms industry darlings like @RepAdamSchiff have sought to re-arm Ukraine and escalate the conflict in Donbas. By stirring up Russiagate, they finally got their deadly deal. My latest: https://t.co/pyJB4btOSk

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) January 8, 2018

It wasn’t until the Trump presidency that those weapons began pouring into Ukraine, and boy howdy are we looking at some “further incursions” now. This change occurred either because Trump was a fully willing participant in the agenda to ramp up aggressions against Moscow, or because he was politically pressured into playing along with that agenda by the collusion narrative which had its origins at every step in the US intelligence cartel, or because of some combination of the two.

In all the world-shaping news stories we’ve been experiencing lately, it’s easy to forget how the narrative that the Kremlin had infiltrated the highest levels of the US government dominated news coverage and political discourse for years on end. But in light of the fact that today’s major headlines now revolve around that exact same foreign government, this fact is probably worth revisiting.

The most important thing to understand about the Trump-Russia collusion narrative is that it began with western intelligence agencies, was sustained by western intelligence agencies, and in the end resulted in cold war escalations against a government long targeted by western intelligence agencies. It was the US intelligence cartel who initiated the still completely unproven and severely plot hole-riddled claim that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to benefit Trump. It was a “former” MI6 operative who produced the notorious and completely discredited Steele Dossier which birthed the narrative that Trump colluded with the Kremlin to steal the 2016 election. It was the FBI who spied on the Trump campaign claiming it was investigating possible ties to Russia. It was the US intelligence cartel which produced, and then later walked back, the narrative that Russia was paying Taliban-linked fighters to kill allied occupiers in Afghanistan which was leveraged by Democrats to demand Trump escalate further against Putin. It was even a CIA officer who just so happened to be in the right place at the right time that kicked off the flimsy impeachment narrative that Trump had suspended arms deliveries to Ukraine.

Every step of the way the mass media was fed reports by intelligence operatives and by elected officials sharing pieces of information they’d been told by intelligence operatives about potential indications of a conspiracy between Trump’s circle and the Russian government, which often faceplanted in the most humiliating ways as subsequent revelations debunked them. Day after day some new “BOMBSHELL” media report would surface tying some obscure Trump underling so some Russian oligarch in some way, the outlet which published it would be rewarded with millions of clicks, only to have it fizzle into a flat nothing pizza within a few days.

25 Times Trump Has Been Dangerously Hawkish On Russia

My response to @CNN‘s ridiculous and profoundly dishonest article “25 times Trump was soft on Russia”.https://t.co/nxX7gHC14m

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) November 18, 2019

Day after day mainstream liberals were promised major revelations which would lead to the entire Trump family being dragged from the White House in chains, and day after day those promises failed to deliver. But what did happen during that time was a mountain of US cold war escalations against Moscow, a very good illustration of the immense difference between narrative and fact.

Trump supporters like to believe that the Deep State tried to remove their president because he was such a brave populist warrior leading a people’s revolution against their Satanic globalist agendas, and surely there were some individual goons within their ranks who would have loved to see him gone. But in reality the major decision makers in the US intelligence cartel never intended to remove Trump from office. They’d have known from their own intel that the Mueller investigation wouldn’t turn up any evidence of a conspiracy with the Russian government, and they’d have known impeachment wouldn’t remove him because they know how to count Senate seats. Russiagate was never about removing Trump, it was about making sure Trump played along with their regime change plans for Moscow and manufacturing mainstream consent for the escalations we’re seeing today.

And now here we are. Joe Lauria has an excellent new article out for Consortium News titled “Biden Confirms Why the US Needed This War” which lays out the evidence that the Ukraine invasion was deliberately provoked to facilitate the longstanding agenda to oust Putin and “ultimately restore a Yeltsin-like puppet to Moscow.” The US could easily have prevented this war with a little bit of diplomacy and a few low-cost concessions, but instead it chose to provoke a war that could then be used to manufacture international consensus for unprecedented acts of economic warfare against Russia with the goal of effecting regime change.

Biden Confirms Why the US Needed This War https://t.co/k8YWZ9ylQH

— Consortium News (@Consortiumnews) March 27, 2022

Lauria writes:

The U.S. got its war in Ukraine. Without it, Washington could not attempt to destroy Russia’s economy, orchestrate worldwide condemnation and lead an insurgency to bleed Russia, all part of an attempt to bring down its government. Joe Biden has now left no doubt that it’s true.

The president of the United States has confirmed what Consortium News and others have been reporting since the beginnings of Russsiagate in 2016, that the ultimate U.S. aim is to overthrow the government of Vladimir Putin.

“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” Biden said on Saturday at the Royal Castle in Warsaw.

This was all planned years in advance. Long before Biden’s presidency, and long before Trump’s. It is not a coincidence that we spent years being bombarded with anti-Russia propaganda in the lead-up to a massive confrontation with that same government. There’s no connection between the discredited allegation that Trump was a secret Kremlin agent and Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, yet the mainstream anti-Russia hysteria manufactured by the former is flowing seamlessly into mainstream opposition of the latter.

This is because this was all planned well in advance. We’re where we’re at now because the US empire brought us here intentionally.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

No subtlety of thought survives in the culture of unreason. Public space is populated with poseurs, cutouts, and imposters. Public discourse, with some exceptions, is much of the time not worth bothering with.

– Patrick Lawrence: Obituary for Russiagate.

There is a conspiracy theory that the CIA put the very expression into general use to discredit alternate theories about the murder of President Kennedy. Perhaps that’s true – there is a CIA document – but the expression has been around for a long time. At any event it has become a slur to discredit political opponents. The accusation replaces rational discussion.

There have been actual conspiracies in history. There was a conspiracy to murder Caesar. And to murder Anwar Sadat. The Bolsheviks did conspire to take power and so did Guy Fawkes. Sometimes they succeeded – often surprising the conspirators – and sometimes they didn’t. Many times the conspirators thought the deed itself was all that needed to be done but Caesar was succeeded by Caesar and Sadat by his chosen successor. There are probably fewer conspiracies than people imagine but they do exist.

Conspiracy theories abound in the USA today. But, it should be made clear from the outset of this discussion that there are two different kinds of conspiracy theories – unacceptable ones and acceptable ones. An example of the first kind is the assertion that Trump was cheated of victory by vote-faking in key areas. The assertion is “baseless”, pushed by the “far-right-wing” and the “deluded“; has been “debunked” in detail; its so-called arguments are “bogus, none credible“; there is “no evidence” and so on. The full weight of the corporate media stands against this idea and it flourishes only in the undergrowth. Nonetheless, 29% of Americans in a March survey “completely” or “mostly” agreed that the election had been stolen from Trump (66% of Republicans, 27% of independents and 4% (!) of Democrats). So that particular conspiracy theory has significant support.

Other conspiracy theories are respectable: for example the one that the Russians got Trump elected in the first place. Loudly trumpeted by the corporate media for the entirety of his term, the indictment of a principal source of the famous dossier ought to have killed it. But no: to the believers the revelation that a key foundation of the conspiracy theory was a made-up and paid-for fraud makes no difference – “Even if every single word in the Steele dossier was wrong, that would not change the fact that the Russians sought to manipulate the US election“; “it wasn’t a hoax“; the fact that it was a fake was further proof that it was Kremlin-managed.

And so the American population is divided between those who think that Putin won the 2016 US presidential election and those who think Trump won the 2020 election. There is no common ground.

A lot has been written about conspiracy theories, the how and why of them – here’s one and there’s plenty more. But something that is seldom mentioned in these discussions is falsifiability. As Karl Popper argued, a real theory must be capable of being proved false. There must be some imaginable empirical datum that would disprove it. Sometimes, as with the addition of the Lorentz transformations to Newtonian/Galilean transformations, an old theory is proven to be accurate but incomplete. Sometimes an old theory is completely disproven as the aether theory was by the Michelson-Morley experiment. But all real theories are falsifiable. A scientific theory, in short, is true until someone proves that it isn’t. As Richard Feynman said: “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts”. And, as another great physicist observed, these changes are not necessarily accomplished by rational argument: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents… but rather because its opponents eventually die.”

This principle can also be applied to conspiracy theories. For example, if it could be established that Dominion voting machines can not be connected to the Internet, that fact would be a fatal blow to one of the pillars of the Trump won story. Likewise, if it could be established that a fundamental source of the Dossier was a fake then a pillar of the Putin elected Trump story falls. A theory that cannot be falsified is nonsense. Likewise a theory whose believers will never accept any contrary evidence is nonsense. Q-Anon rolls on for years promising the Complete Revelation every tomorrow and the one after that; the Russiagate conspiracy theory rolls on mutating as required. The more contrary evidence, the more tightly believers cling to them. Actual conspiracy theories therefore are not falsifiable because they’re all conspiracy and no theory.

If they are falsifiable, therefore, “conspiracy theories” are theories; no modifier. The examples in the article cited above – Pizzagate, Q-Anon, Obama’s place of birth and Soros – all happen to be theories that violate conventional wisdom and therefore are tossed into the conspiracy theory bin by the conventionally-inclined. Typically, the author makes no mention of a conspiracy theory that occupied far more space and effort and had much greater effect on the real world than any of these. And that’s because Trumputin was conventional wisdom, pushed every day by the corporate media, and the others weren’t. Trumputin was said to have “a mountain of evidence” and “proof“; the others were dismissed without consideration.

In short, rather than using the useless expletive “conspiracy theory”, it would be more accurate to say that theories that run counter to conventional wisdom abound in the United States today. Some of them – Q-Anon – fail the test of falsifiability, others do not. Some have received enough attention to make them more or less probable, others have not. In this respect, it is appropriate to look at what Americans think of their mass media. To an older generation “I read it in the paper” meant something but a Gallup poll in October tells us that it doesn’t mean much today. Only 7% of US adults surveyed had a “great deal” of “trust and confidence” and 29% “a fair amount”; the “trusters” were outnumbered by the 29% who had “none at all” and 34% “not very much”; in 1997 the trusters were 53%. Does anyone expect that decline to reverse? Another poll says the USA ranks last in media trust of 86 countries. One more shows a major political division. No one should be surprised – the mainstream media was full of one conspiracy theory and ignored the other.

COVID-19 is another revelation that there are two separate islands of opinion. Take, for example, the simple factual question – yes or no – did Dr Fauci’s organisation fund gain-of-function experiments in the Wuhan laboratory? A rather important matter, one would think. Snopes, that reliable defender of the status quo, says “unproven” in May in a long-winded piece. Denied by Fauci in May: “The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” Two Pinocchios said the WaPo. But finally admitted in October: “a top official at the National Institutes of Health has conceded that contrary to the repeated assertions of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the NIH did indeed fund highly dangerous gain-of-function research on bat-borne coronaviruses in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” And more: “The annual report described the group’s work from June 2017 to May 2018, which involved creating new viruses using different parts of existing bat coronaviruses and inserting them into humanized mice in a lab in Wuhan, China. The work was overseen by the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is headed by Anthony Fauci.” And so May’s conspiracy theory became October’s fact.

Did the virus leak from these US-funded experiments? No one knows but it cannot be ruled out. As to Dr Fauci himself, he may have overreached by telling his critics that he represents science; when even the WaPo carries a piece entitled “Fauci Can’t Use Science to Excuse His Missteps” perhaps his best-before date is nearing. Despite the prayer candles. In this respect, the fate of Robert Kennedy’s book, The Real Dr Fauci, is indicative; it’s Number One on Amazon with 96% five-star ratings. This is the more remarkable because of the full-scale attack on him from the establishment media: he is “the dumbest Kennedy“; “race-baiting ‘documentary’ and disinformation to advance bogus theories and seed anti-vaccine sentiment“; “documented history of promoting debunked theories about vaccines“; banned on social media. Tucker Carlson, in “a new escalation of his anti-science rhetoric”, had an interview “with longtime anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.” Nonetheless, a lot of people are buying and reading it. These media campaigns don’t work as well as they used to. Indeed the 29% who had no trust at all probably believe the reverse of what the conventional media says. I know I do: if they’re all shouting the same thing, I take it as a powerful indicator that the opposite is true. We should read Western media the way the Soviets read theirs.

However, there are unrelenting attempts to create conspiracy theories that all Americans can agree on. For years we have had the conspiracy theory that Putin is behind everything bad; in its current manifestation he’s about to invade Ukraine (or as the US Defense Secretary put it: “an incursion by the Soviet Union into the Ukraine“). Another fast-growing set of conspiracy theories focus on China, the “Wuhan lab leak” being one example. (Dangerous that because of Fauci’s funding of GoF research in Wuhan). China is about to invade Taiwan or starving Uyghers are forced to stuff themselves with pork or tennis players are disappeared; these conspiracy theories are safer. One of the principal pushers of the first conspiracy theory is switching to the other: he senses the change in the party line. And there’s always North Korea where the rats eat the babies and the babies eat the rats.

The China conspiracy theory seems to be working – a survey by the Reagan Foundation found that 52% saw China as the “greatest threat” to the USA (Russia well behind at 14% and North Korea just behind it at 12%). Three years ago Russia was 30% to China’s 21%. More striking is that China has gained twenty points since February. Can the Putin-won-2016/Trump-won-2020 divide be bridged by a Chinadunnit conspiracy theory?

But agreeing on a common enemy is one thing, the internal divisions are something else. In this respect the Reagan Foundation survey cited above is indicative. It finds that disbelief is spreading rapidly in the American population: trust in all institutions is dropping; confidence in the US military is dropping; support for active global leadership is dropping. A survey just now shows a slight majority of American youth regarding their democracy as in trouble. Not the strongest foundation for more foreign adventures.

A deeply divided country: there is no common conversation in the United States today – one person’s conspiracy theory is another’s truth.

The Nixon Conspiracy: Watergate and the Plot to Remove the President, by Geoff Shepard (Bombardier Books, 2021), 384 pages.

There’s an old saying in legal circles: “A prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich.” That is, a determined prosecutor can allege a crime, somewhere, thereby securing an indictment against a hapless defendant. And if that’s true, then what can 150 prosecutors do?

That’s the question posed by veteran lawyer Geoff Shepard in his new book, The Nixon Conspiracy: Watergate and the Plot to Remove the President. The conspiracy Shepard limns isn’t by Richard Nixon, it’s against Nixon. A conspiracy waged by some 150 Democratic prosecutors and investigators, scattered across the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the federal government, all aiming to bring down the 37th president—who was, of course, a Republican.

Shepard is fully mindful of the parallels. As he writes, “If Donald Trump hoped to understand what he would face upon moving into the White House in 2017, he would have done well to study what happened to Richard Nixon nearly fifty years prior.” In fact, all the parallels fall into place: zealous prosecutors, a leaky bureaucracy, an avidly supportive media, and pre-primed Democrats in Congress, eager to impeach the miscreant chief executive. (In fact, there’s a third Republican president who found himself in these same crosshairs, and we’ll get to him later.)

During the Watergate investigation, beginning in 1972, Democrats succeeded in doing something seemingly impossible: They overturned one of the most decisive electoral mandates in U.S. presidential history. First elected in 1968, Nixon had been reelected four years later with a massive 60.7 percent of the vote, winning 49 of the 50 states. And yet less than two years later, in August 1974, he was forced to resign.

So how did Democrats accomplish that feat? That’s the subject of Shepard’s book. Let him set the stage: “By the time Nixon took power in 1969, the ‘Deep State’ had held the reins of power for 40 years and wasn’t about to give it up. President Eisenhower had famously warned against the ‘military-industrial complex,’ but the Deep State’s tentacles reached much deeper than just the military and allied industries.”

As for Shepard himself, he worked in the Nixon White House for more than five years, first on domestic policy, and then as part of the Nixon legal defense team. The author doesn’t dispute that crimes were committed in Nixon’s name—most notoriously, the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) on June 17, 1972. And so he makes no attempt to dismiss or minimize the guilt of such figures as E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy. Indeed, Shepard paints Liddy, who worked for a time at the White House, as a nut, even a psychopath.

We can immediately observe that someone such as Liddy slipping into the White House is not a good sign. And yet the overall Executive Office of the President is a big place, employing thousands of people, and so it’s inevitable that a crazy or two can get past the gatekeepers.

In any case, as Shepard records, Liddy soon moved to Nixon’s campaign operation, the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CRP, or, of course, “CREEP”). And that’s where, Shepard argues, the real criminality was hatched. Campaigns, after all, are much scruffier, since they are focused on, well, defeating the other side. And to defeat the other side, campaigns engage in “opposition research,” which has, at one or time or another, included just about every possible means, fair or foul. Thus campaigns can attract netherworld types, who sometimes feel free to pursue their dark arts by any means they deem necessary. Keeping his eye on the present, as well as the past, Shepard adds, “As the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC showed in the creation of the infamous Steele Dossier, aggressive oppo research can get out of hand.”

There’s little doubt that the 2016 Clinton campaign was up to its eyeballs in the financing and disseminating of the fake-news Steele Dossier, which seems to have been an effort to defraud not only the FBI, but also the American people. In other words, it sure looks like a conspiracy so immense. Yet only now, five years later, have just two figures on the edge of the campaign, lawyer Michael Sussmann and researcher/fabricator Igor Danchenko, been formally charged. Yet it seems at least plausible that important Clinton campaign officials—and perhaps the candidate herself—were at least aware of these duplicities. Will any of them ever be charged? We don’t know.

All we do know is that in the case of Nixon a half-century ago, the legal piranhas were swarming, each set of jaws eager to chomp on the Republican president. And how could they not be ready to take a bite? As Shepard notes, the waters had been chummed by Sen. Edward Kennedy and his chief aide, James Flug, who were preparing what they hoped would be a triumphant Kennedy presidential campaign in 1976.

As Shepard demonstrates, a key weapon in this proto-campaign was the “independent” (sic) legal investigation of the incumbent president, launched in May 1973, under the leadership of Archibald Cox, a former campaign adviser to John F. Kennedy and then solicitor general in his Department of Justice. In fact, the very name of Cox’s investigative body, the Watergate Special Prosecution Force (WSPF)—signaled its intended teleology. (In later decades, subsequent iterations of the same investigative approach were softened to “independent counsel” and “special counsel.”)

Cox’s WSPF was a murderer’s row of partisan Democrats. As Shepard writes,

Some seventeen DOJ Democrat appointees, who had been removed from power as a result of Nixon’s 1968 election, regained full investigative and prosecutorial authority over a subsequent Republican administration… a special prosecutor and his team represented a handpicked, specially recruited cadre of highly partisan prosecutors brought together to focus on but a single target. This team also asserted jurisdiction over any possible investigations into possible Democrat wrongdoing—never actually investigating, but effectively precluding any such inquiry by others. This partisan targeting flies in the face of any concept of equal justice under law.

This is the heart of Shepard’s argument: From the get-go, WSPF was out to get Nixon. Not just the obvious Watergate criminals, such as Hunt and Liddy, but Nixon himself.

Those who might wish to discount Shepard as a Nixon dead-ender might be more persuaded by George V. Higgins, a Massachusetts-born prosecutor-turned-novelist who in 1975 published a non-fiction book about Watergate, portraying Nixon as a white-collar gangster. With no little bit of admiration, Higgins noted the purpose-driven life of the WSPF; the entire staff, he wrote, was “conditioned… by the Kennedy Justice methodology.” That methodology came from onetime attorney general Robert F. Kennedy, who saw the Justice Department as a tool to accomplish pre-determined ends. Hence the DOJ’s “Get Hoffa” team, dedicated to the conviction and and imprisonment of Teamster chief Jimmy Hoffa.

Higgins added that out of RFK’s instrumentalist ruthlessness “came targeted law enforcement: upon identification of the bad guy, the suspect may resign himself to merciless investigation, reinvestigation, indictment, and re-indictment, trial and retrial, until at last the Government secures a verdict which ratifies the prosector’s assessment of the defendant as the bad guy.”

And Shepard adduces another close observer, The Boston Globe’s John Aloysius Farrell:

Cox and his zealous staff had gone to work with an obvious aim—to get Richard Nixon—and with an array of prosecutorial tactics that would become so familiar to Americans as a series of “independent” counsels, in collusion with Congress and the media, hounded presidents of both parties over the next twenty-five years. . . . [Cox] chose a suspect first and then used a nigh-unlimited budget, his team of 150 investigators, lawyers, and support personnel and his broad subpoena power to find a crime.

Farrell also took note of WSPF’s extra-legal efforts to unsweeten the Nixon pot: “To generate public support for the process, Cox’s office deftly leaked to the press: over the summer of 1973, the media reported that Cox’s team was examining Nixon campaign fund-raising; corporate favors; the President’s tax returns, and government-financed improvements to Nixon’s homes in Florida and California.”

The result, Shepard says, was a “legal pogrom,” staged by “highly partisan Nixon-haters.” To put that another way, it was the Deep State rising against the Republican president.

In fact, the hating went beyond Nixon and his administration. Shepard documents that WSPF chose to investigate “every single potential GOP presidential candidate going into the upcoming 1976 election.” Quoth the author:

Internal WSPF documents that I uncovered at our National Archives show investigations of John Connally, whom they ultimately indicted in the Milk Producers case; President Gerald Ford; Vice President Nelson Rockefeller; Ford’s vice presidential running mate, Kansas Senator Bob Dole; and even California Governor Ronald Reagan.

And once again, it all leaked: “Somehow, news of each of these investigations leaked to an interested media, requiring each to defend himself against rumored allegations of financial wrongdoing. The initiatives of this task force required the work of eight prosecutors.”

Yet it wasn’t just WSPF pushing the needle past the ethical red line. There was also WSPF’s partner—that’s the right word, according to Shepard—Judge John Sirica. Sirica is typically remembered as a hero of Watergate; he was Time magazine’s “Man of the Year” in 1973. And yet Shepard begs to differ with this lionization. He documents (in this book, as well as in two previous books on Watergate) that Sirica was in league closely with the persecutors, er, prosecutors all along. Regarding one of Sirica’s many improper ex parte meetings with prosecutors, Shepard writes:

If disclosed at any time during the scandal’s unfolding, [it] would have been sufficient to remove each of the participants—judges and prosecutors alike—from anything further to do with the Watergate prosecutions. Their presence at the meeting might have been sufficient to have them removed from office entirely.

Interestingly, none of these unethical sessions were disclosed at the time. And why not? Because those were the days of a monolithic liberal media, which was devoted to passionate cheerleading for the prosecutors, as opposed to dispassionate reporting on events. Shepard writes of the one-sided media environment, “There was simply no means for the Nixon administration to get its views on various issues before the American people at all.”

And oh yes: WSPF and Sirica had a third partner, in the U.S. Senate. That would be the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities—generally known as the Ervin Committee. Launched in February 1973, it was led by Sen. Sam Ervin (D-NC), a courtly old fellow who looked all of his 76 years. Shepard writes, “In essence, the Ervin Committee was run by its majority counsel, Samuel Dash.” Who, Shepard adds, “conveniently hired many of Senator Kennedy’s staff members from his earlier investigation.”

So Nixon was up against this federal-government-wide legal trifecta: the Ervin Committee representing the legislative branch, Sirica (and, according to Shepard, other judges colluding with him), covering the judicial branch, and WSPF, which was fully in tune with the Deep State elements of the executive branch.

Shepard argues that this combined-arms onslaught swept up the innocent, as well as the guilty. And among the innocent, Shepard maintains, was White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, domestic policy adviser John Ehrlichman, and…Richard Nixon. The Judas figure, in Shepard’s telling, was White House counsel John Dean, described as “a very accomplished liar.” And so, in Shepard’s account, the top Nixon men, wrongly accused, went to their legal Calvary.

Ah, but what about that famous “smoking gun” conversation of June 23, 1972—less than a week after the break-in—featuring that same put-upon trio: Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Nixon? Doesn’t that tape-recorded session prove that they were guilty, guilty, and guilty?

Shepard says “no,” arguing that the conversation has been badly—and deliberately—misinterpreted all these years: It was really about concealing the names of Democratic donors to Nixon’s re-election campaign whose money was being used for the legal defense of the Watergate breaker-inners. Understandably, these donors wished to keep quiet their connection to the dreaded Nixon.

Perhaps the June 23 conversation was improper, Shepard allows, but it was not the crime of the Watergate cover-up: “The only goal was to prevent several major Democrat donors from being embarrassed, and this was in no sense a criminal act.” Indeed, Shepard quotes John Dean, no fan of any of the people involved, writing in 2014: “In short, the smoking gun was shooting blanks.”

We can each listen to the tape or read the transcript and judge for ourselves, and yet for Shepard, the lesson is clear: the “smoking gun” was just the final kill-shot fired into the unfairly vilified president. The real story of Watergate, Shepard concludes, is “how President Nixon, along with a handful of well-meaning staff and supporters, ended up taking the fall for the misdeeds of their underlings.”

So we can see: before Trump was the target of the Democrats’ legal-industrial complex, Nixon was the target.

Indeed, we can now add a third Republican presidential target, Ronald Reagan. It’s less remembered now, but the 40th president faced a similar legal-investigative barrage, beginning in 1986, in the form of the Iran-Contra investigation. Indeed, Democrats winched up all their legal siege machinery: a Congressional select committee, an “independent” investigation filled with Democratic hit-men, and, of course, a collusionist media; in the exultant words of Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee, a leading enemy of Nixon, “I haven’t had so much fun since Watergate.”

The Iran-Contra investigation was certainly damaging to Reagan, and yet it fell far short of the Nixonian benchmark; in fact, by the end of his presidency, the Gipper was once again flying high.

One fine day, some careful chronicler will outline all the parallels of these three cases across five decades, tallying the score as one clear political kill (Nixon) one partial kill (Trump), and one mere damage to the target (Reagan).

Yet for now, Shepard has written a persuasively contrarian history of the first of these legal assaults on a Republican president. And who knows: By the time someone gets around to connecting the dots on the first three, there will be a fourth.

theamericanconservative.com

By Patrick LAWRENCE

Russiagate, that fraudulent fable wherein Russian President Vladimir Putin personally subverted American democracy, Russian intelligence pilfered the Democratic Party’s email, and Donald Trump acted at the Kremlin’s behest, is at last dead.

No, nothing sudden. It has been a slow, painful death of the sort this destructive beast richly deserved. But its demise is now definitive — in the courts and on paper. We await the better historians to see this properly into the record.

Three key operatives in the construction of the Russiagate edifice are indicted for lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation about aspects of the Russiagate tale.  The Steele dossier, the document on which much of the case against former President Trump rested, is now exposed as a Nixonesque “dirty trick” authorized and paid for by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.

Some mainstream newspapers — certainly not all — are busy in their archives, editing out the worst of the falsehoods they reported in 2016 and 2017 as unassailable fact.

This is a wholesale collapse now.

There are, as one would expect, those who seem determined to hold out no matter what the factual evidence. These go well beyond MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, whose record I will let speak for itself.

I am thinking of people such as David Corn, the Mother Jones correspondent in Washington, and David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. Both invested big time into the Russiagate junk, and both published books filled with the ridiculous, evidence-free piffle of which it was made.

Corn, Frum and numerous others like them are now industriously throwing good money after bad to go by recent publications. Here is Corn’s latest, and here Frum’s. One finds the same tired combination of presumption, useless innuendo, and spoon-fed, evidence-deficient falsities derived from the intelligence agencies that were key to fomenting the Russiagate hoax. Yes, Messrs. Corn and Frum, it was a hoax.

To these diehards, people such as your columnist, given to rational, disinterested consideration of what is known and what is conjured from thin air, are “denialists.” Strange it is that those denying established facts and truths call those who accept these facts and truths by this name.

But this is a measure of the extent Russiagate has plunged us into Alice–in–Wonderland depths where what is up is down, what is dark is light, what is true is to be buried, what is false is to be held high — where blindness is preferred to sight.

This leads us to the essential question we now face, or one of them. What are the consequences of the Russiagate scam? If it rested on lies start-to-finish, this is not to say it did not exact its price. It did. The price is high, and we are fated to pay it for some time to come.

The Damage Done

Nov. 11, 2017, protest outside the White House, dubbed the “Kremlin Annex.” (Wikimedia Commons/Ted Eytan)

An inquiry of this kind must begin with the damage Russiagate has done to the prevalent American consciousness. The last five years have delivered Americans into a culture of unreason of the kind they have been prone to indulging periodically throughout their history. It is made in equal parts of a native insecurity and anxiety, of paranoia and of irrationality.

This is at once a pitiable and dangerous state. All is reduced to the Manichean distinctions characteristic of the old Westerns (not to mention most of the good guys vs. bad guys Dreck that comes out of Hollywood these days).

No subtlety of thought survives in the culture of unreason. Public space is populated with poseurs, cutouts, and imposters. Public discourse, with some exceptions, is much of the time not worth bothering with.

To understand this condition, we must recognize it as the work of a diabolic alliance comprised of the Democratic Party’s corrupt leadership, the F.B.I. and other law-enforcement agencies, the national security apparatus and its many appendages, and the media. It is no longer in the slightest objectionable to speak or write of a Deep State that controls this country.

The elite minority this alliance represents derives its power from its claim to speak for the majority — an absolutely classic case of the “soft despotism” Alexis de Tocqueville warned Americans of 190 years ago. Liberal authoritarianism is another name for what has consolidated itself in the years since Democrats, in mid–2016, first raised the phony specter of Russia “hacking” into its mail systems.

In effect, Russiagate has tipped the American polity upside down. It is the illiberal liberals among us, righteous as the old Puritan ministers of New England, who now prosecute a regime of censorship and suppression of dissent that is at least as severe and anti-democratic as what conservatives had going during the Cold War (and in my view worse).

It is they who seek to cow ordinary Americans into the new, weird idolatry of authority, no matter that those to whom the nation is urged to bow are proven liars, law-breakers and propagandists.

Culture of Unreason

Street art, Washington, D.C., May 2016. (Ted Eytan, Flickr)

There is, of course, the more dangerous world Russiagate has done so much to create. In the culture of unreason, the Deep State has a discouraging record of success in gaining wide public support for any aggressive campaign against any nation or people it wishes to act against.

In this dimension, Russiagate has destroyed the Democrats as a party willing to stand against the imperial project in its late phase.

A war with China over the Taiwan question is now spoken of as a logical possibility. Washington is now raising the temperature on the Ukraine–Russia border, just as it did when it cultivated the 2014 coup in Kiev, and this is put across as a Democratic administration’s sound policy. Rampant Russophobia is a direct consequence of the Russiagate ruse, Sinophobia its uglier sibling — uglier for its racist subtext.

We have active subversion operations in Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba and Peru, all progressive states in the true meaning of this term, and Democrats of all stripes — including “progressives” with the necessary quotation marks — cheer on every one of them.

We cannot view this as distinct from the elevation of institutions dedicated to campaigns of covert subterfuge — chiefly but not only the C.I.A. — to wholly inappropriate positions of respect.

The damage Russiagate has done to the press … let me rephrase this.  The damage the press has inflicted upon itself in the cause of Russiagate is so extensive it is hard to calculate with any precision. We watch now as their credibility collapses in real time.

Those running the mainstream newspapers and networks seem to understand this, as they rush to protect what remains of their reputations with rearguard actions to obscure their grossly irresponsible conduct.

The long list of those who caved to the Russiagate orthodoxy includes some stunning names. Among publications that should have known better we find Mother Jones, The Nation, The Intercept, and Democracy Now! Was it conformity, pressure from donors or Democratic Party ventriloquists, or some combination of ideology, ignorance and inexperience that caused them to flip?

The Atlantic, The New Yorker, the major dailies, the networks — they have all sustained one or another degree of discredit, left either to craven rewrites in their archives, denial in the Corn–Frum mode, or silence. None will do: They will never regain lost ground without first acknowledging what they have done, and this appears out of the question.

Resort of Omission

“The Usual Suspects,” urban art, Norway, 2015. (Anne Worner, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Think about it: Lengthy hearings on Capitol Hill, in which leading Democratic Party Russiagaters admit under oath they never had any of the evidence they long claimed, go unreported. The collapse of the Steele dossier goes unreported in The New York Times and other major dailies.

It is but a short step to all else that is newsworthy but left out — the collapse of the case against Julian Assange (against whom the Russiagate frenzy was wielded), the collapse of the chemical weapons case in Syria, all the above-noted covert subversions.

It is wholesale dereliction of duty now, and it was Russiagate that licensed this betrayal.

Mainstream media are now approaching that point when they leave out more of the world we live in than they report. This is a losing proposition in the medium term — a desperate, last-ditch strategy to defend a “narrative” that simply no longer holds. I put the acceleration of this trend down to the poisoned information environment Russiagate did so much to engender.

There is a positive dimension to the media’s fate since Russiagate, and regular readers of this column may already guess where I am headed. The disaster Russiagate has proven for the corporate-owned press, the networks, and the “left” — with-quotation-marks — press has landed independent media such as Consortium News with large, new responsibilities, and they have by-and-large risen to the occasion. Their role in keeping the truth of the Russiagate fraud on the table cannot be overstated.

We witness, in effect, an historically significant transformation in how Americans get their news and analysis. This, a gradual process, is an excellent thing. In time, independent media stand to play as important a role in repairing the across-the-board damage of Russiagate as legacy media played in hatching and deepening it.

consortiumnews.com

Five years after the Hillary Clinton campaign-funded collection of Trump-Russia conspiracy theories known as the Steele dossier was published by BuzzFeed, news outlets that amplified its false allegations have suffered major losses of credibility. The recent indictment of the dossier’s main source, Igor Danchenko, for allegedly lying to the FBI, has catalyzed a new reckoning.

In response to what the news site Axios has called “one of the most egregious journalistic errors in modern history,” the Washington Post has re-edited at least a dozen stories related to Steele. For two of those, the Post removed entire sections, changed headlines, and added lengthy editor’s notes.

Rosalind Helderman: Bylined reporter on two of the Post’s most corrected stories. Twitter/@PostRoz

But the Post’s response also exhibits the limits of the media’s Steele-induced self-examination. First, the reporters bylined on those two articles, Rosalind S.

But the Post’s response also exhibits the limits of the media’s Steele-induced self-examination. First, the reporters bylined on those two articles, Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger, and their editors have declined to explain how and why they were so egregiously misled. Nor have they revealed the names of the anonymous sources responsible for deceiving them and the public over months and years.

Perhaps more important, the Post, like other publications, has so far limited its Russiagate reckoning to work directly involving Steele – and only after a federal indictment forced its hand. But the Steele dossier has been widely discredited since at least April 2019, when Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller and his team of prosecutors and FBI agents were unable to find evidence in support of any of its claims.

The dossier was also only one aspect of the Trump-Russia misinformation fed to the public. Even when not advancing Steele’s most lurid allegations, the nation’s most prominent news outlets nonetheless furthered his underlying narrative of a Trump-Russia conspiracy and a Kremlin-compromised White House.

Along the way, some journalists won their profession’s highest distinction for this flawed coverage. While co-bylining stories that the Post has all but retracted, Helderman and Hamburger also share a now increasingly awkward honor along with more than a dozen other colleagues at the Post and New York Times: a Pulitzer Prize. In 2018, the Pulitzer awards committee honored the two papers for 20 articles it described as “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.”

Above, Washingon Post and New York Times reporters whose 2018 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting on the Trump-Russia affair is tainted by evidence in the public record that significant reporting was erroneous or misleading — reporting that still has not been corrected by their publications, even though the Post recently made numerous corrections regarding the long-discredited Steele dossier. Journalist identifications are here. (Credit: YouTube/The Pulitzer Prizes)

Although neither newspaper has given any indication that it is returning the Pulitzer, the public record has long made clear that many of those stories – most of which had nothing to do with Steele – include falsehoods and distortions requiring significant corrections. Far from showing “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage,” the Post’s and the Times’ reporting has the same problem as the Steele document that these same outlets are now distancing themselves from: a reliance on anonymous, deceptive, and almost certainly partisan sources for claims that proved to be false.

Many other prestigious outlets published a barrage of similarly flawed articles. These include the report by Peter Stone and Greg Gordon of McClatchy that the Mueller team obtained evidence that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen had visited Prague in 2016; Jane Mayer’s fawning March 2018 profile of Steele in the New Yorker; the report by Jason Leopold and Anthony Cormier of BuzzFeed that President Trump instructed Cohen to lie to Congress — explicitly denied by Mueller at the time; and Luke Harding of The Guardian’s bizarre and evidence-free allegation that Julian Assange and Paul Manafort met in London’s Ecuadorian embassy.

McClatchy and BuzzFeed have added editors’ notes to their stories but have not retracted them.

In this article, RealClearInvestigations has collected five instances of stories containing false or misleading claims, and thereby due for retraction or correction, that were either among the Post and Times’ Pulitzer-winning entries, or other work of reporters who shared that prize. Significantly, this analysis is not based on newly discovered information, but documents and other material long in the public domain. Remarkably, some of the material that should spark corrections has instead been held up by the Post and Times as vindication of their work.

RCI sent detailed queries about these stories to the Post, the Times, and the journalists involved. The Post’s response has been incorporated into the relevant portion of this article. The Times did not respond to RCI’s queries by the time of publication.

Falsehood No. 1: Michael Flynn Discussed Sanctions With Russia and Lied About It

Flynn faces the press in his only White House Briefing Room remarks as national security adviser. YouTube/C-SPAN

Officials say Flynn discussed sanctions
By Greg Miller, Adam Entous and Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post, February 9, 2017

Less than a month after BuzzFeed published the Steele dossier, the Washington Post significantly advanced the then-growing narrative that the Trump White House was beholden to Russia.

A Feb. 9, 2017, Post article claimed that National Security Adviser Michael Flynn “privately discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia” with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak “during the month before President Trump took office, contrary to public assertions by Trump officials.” The Post sourced its reporting to nine “current and former officials” who occupied “senior positions at multiple agencies at the time of the calls” between Flynn and Kislyak following the Nov. 8, 2016 election.

The Post’s sources – who were revealing classified information, presumably from taps on Kislyak’s phone – left no room for doubt: “All of those officials said Flynn’s references to the election-related sanctions were explicit.” They also added their own spin to the meaning of the conversations: Flynn’s calls with Kislyak “were interpreted by some senior U.S. officials as an inappropriate and potentially illegal signal to the Kremlin that it could expect a reprieve from sanctions that were being imposed by the Obama administration in late December to punish Russia for its alleged interference in the 2016 election.”

Adding some mind-reading to the narrative, a former official told the Post that Kislyak “was left with the impression that the sanctions would be revisited at a later time.”

The Post and its sources fueled innuendo that Flynn had floated a payback for Russia’s alleged 2016 election help and lied to cover it up.

Facing a barrage of anonymous officials contradicting him, Flynn walked back an initial denial and told the Post that “while he had no recollection of discussing sanctions, he couldn’t be certain that the topic never came up.” Four days later, he was forced to resign. The following December, Special Counsel Mueller seemingly vindicated the Post’s narrative when Flynn pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI, including about his discussion of sanctions with the Russian ambassador.

Flynn would later backtrack and reverse that guilty plea, sparking a multi-year legal saga. When the transcripts of his calls with Kislyak were finally released in May 2020, they showed that Flynn had grounds to fight: It wasn’t Flynn who made a false statement about discussing sanctions with Kislyak; it was all nine of the Post’s sources — and, later, the Mueller team — who had misled the public.

Sergei Kislyak: Transcripts of Flynn’s calls with the Russian Ambassador do not square with the Washington Post’s reporting. AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File

In all of Flynn’s multiple conversations with Kislyak in December 2016 and January 2017, the issue of sanctions only gets one fleeting mention – by Kislyak. The Russian ambassador tells Flynn that he is concerned that sanctions will hurt U.S.-Russia cooperation on fighting jihadist insurgents in Syria. The sum total of Flynn’s response on the matter: “Yeah, yeah.”

The pair did have a longer discussion about a separate action Obama had ordered at the time: the expulsion of 35 Russian officials living in the United States. The expulsions, which were carried out by the State Department, were a distinct action from the sanctions, which targeted nine Russian entities and individuals under a presidential executive order.

In discussing the expulsions, Flynn never addressed what Trump might do; his only request was that the Kremlin’s response be “reciprocal” and “even-keeled” so that “cool heads” can “prevail.”

“[D]on’t go any further than you have to,” Flynn told Kislyak. “Because I don’t want us to get into something that has to escalate, on a, you know, on a tit for tat.”

In its rendering of the call, the Mueller team cited these comments from Flynn – but inaccurately claimed that he had made them about sanctions. The Special Counsel’s Office appeared to be following the lead of the Post’s sources, who had claimed, falsely, that Flynn’s references to sanctions were “explicit.” Both the Post and the special counsel used Flynn’s explicit comments about expulsions to erroneously assert that he had discussed sanctions.

Yet the release of the transcripts did not prompt the Post to come clean. Instead, both the Post and the New York Times doubled down on the deception. The Post’s May 29, 2020, story about the transcripts’ release was headlined “Transcripts of calls between Flynn, Russian diplomat show they discussed sanctions.” The Times claimed that same day that “Flynn Discussed Sanctions at Length With Russian Diplomat, Transcripts Show.”

In reality, the transcripts showed the exact opposite.

In response to RCI, the Post acknowledged that the Feb. 9, 2017 story had conflated “sanctions” with “expulsions.”

“We appropriately used the word ‘sanctions’ in reference to the punitive measures announced by President Obama, including Treasury penalties on Russian individuals, expulsions of Russian diplomats/spies and the seizure of two Russia-owned properties,” Shani George, the Post’s Vice President for Communications, wrote.

In other articles, however — including a Dec. 29, 2016 article linked in the Feb. 9 story’s second paragraph – the Post made a clear distinction between the two. Asked about dropping the distinction between sanctions and expulsions for the article discussed here, the Post did not respond by the time of publication.

Falsehood No. 2: Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence

Left to right, Carter Page, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone: Repeated contacts with Russian spies? Doubtful. FNC/AP

Trump Campaign Aides Had
Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence
By Michael S. Schmidt, Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo
New York Times, February 14, 2017

On Feb. 14, 2017 – just one day after Flynn resigned – the New York Times fanned the flames of the growing Trump-Russia inferno.

“Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials,” the Times reported.

The story, written by three members of the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning team, Michael S. Schmidt, Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo, also suggested that these suspicious “repeated contacts” were the basis for the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s potential conspiracy with Russia: “American law enforcement and intelligence agencies intercepted the communications around the same time they were discovering evidence that Russia was trying to disrupt the presidential election by hacking into the Democratic National Committee, three of the officials said. The intelligence agencies then sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election.”

The article even threw in a plug for Christopher Steele, who, the Times said, is believed by senior FBI officials to have “a credible track record.”

The story helped build momentum for the appointment of Special Counsel Mueller, and then quickly unraveled.

Four months after the Times’ report – and just weeks after Mueller’s hiring – FBI Director James Comey testified to Congress about the story, saying that “in the main, it was not true.” When the Mueller report was released in April 2019, it contained no evidence of any contacts between Trump associates and Russian intelligence officials, senior or otherwise. And in July 2020, declassified documents showed that Peter Strzok, the top FBI counterintelligence agent who opened the Trump-Russia probe, had privately dismissed the article. The Times reporting, Strzok wrote upon its publication, was “misleading and inaccurate … we are unaware of ANY Trump advisers engaging in conversations with Russian intelligence officials.”

Comey on Times story: “In the main, it was not true.” It’s still uncorrected.

To date, the Times has appended two minor corrections. The most recent one reads: “An earlier version of a photo caption with this article gave an incorrect middle initial for Paul Manafort. It is J., not D.”

Rather than address its glaring errors, the Times left the story otherwise intact. When the Strzok notes disputing its claims emerged, the Times responded: “We stand by our reporting.”

Earlier this year, the Times even claimed vindication. The occasion was an April 15, 2021, press release from the Treasury Department. The Treasury statement alleged that Konstantin Kilimnik, a former aide to Trump’s one-time campaign manager, Paul Manafort, is a “known Russian Intelligence Services agent” who “provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy” during the 2016 election.

Writing that same day, Times reporters Mark Mazzetti and Michael S. Schmidt declared that Treasury’s evidence-free press release — coupled with an evidence-free Senate Intelligence claim in August 2020 that Kilimnik is a “Russian intelligence officer” — now “confirm” the Times’ report from February 2017.

The Treasury announcement did not explain how the department, which conducted no official Russiagate investigation, was prompted to lodge an explosive allegation that a multi-year FBI/Mueller investigation found no evidence for. It also does not name the position Kilimnik allegedly held in Russian intelligence – much less say whether he was a senior official. It also failed to address ample countervailing evidence:

• that Kilimnik had shared this same, publicly available polling data with Americans;
• that the FBI still does not deem him a Russian intelligence officer, instead claiming that he has unspecified “ties”;
• that he had long been a valued State Department source;
• that he traveled to the U.S. on a civilian Russian passport, not the suspicious diplomatic one Mueller alleged without producing it;
• and that even the Senate Intelligence Committee was “unable to obtain direct evidence of what Kilimnik did with the polling data and whether that data was shared further.”

Wanted in U.S., Kilimnik shared his “R” (regular) U.S. visa and Russian civilian passport with RCI. Konstantin Kilimnik via RealClearInvestigations

In addition, no U.S. government or congressional investigator ever contacted him for questioning, Kilimnik told RCI in an April 2021 interview when he produced images of the civilian passport.

To declare victory, Mazzetti and Schmidt not only relied on one sentence of a press release but distorted the claims of their original story. Even if Kilimnik somehow proved to be a Russian intelligence officer, the Times’ 2017 story had reported that the Trump campaign had engaged in “intercepted calls” with multiple “senior Russian intelligence officials” – not just one person, and at a “senior” level.

To elide that, Mazzetti and Schmidt abandoned the plural Russian “intelligence officials” to spin the Treasury press release as proof that “there had been numerous interactions between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence during the year before the election.” It then returned to the use of the plural to further claim that Treasury’s statement is “the strongest evidence to date that Russian spies had penetrated the inner workings of the Trump campaign.”

RCI sent Mazzetti and Schmidt detailed questions about their February 2017 article and their claim, four years later, that a Senate report and a Treasury press release confirm it. They did not respond.

Falsehood No. 3: George Papadopoulos’s ‘Night of Heavy Drinking’ With the Australian Envoy

The Times mischaracterized George Papadopoulos’s supposed Russiagate-launching barroom chat. AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

Unlikely Source Propelled Russian Meddling Inquiry
By Sharon LaFraniere, Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo
New York Times, December 30, 2017

By late 2017, the Russiagate saga was engulfing the Trump presidency. The indictments of several figures connected to Trump fueled a media-driven narrative that Mueller was closing in on a Trump-Russia conspiracy.

But a roadblock emerged in late October. After a year of evasions, the Hillary Clinton campaign and its law firm Perkins Coie admitted that they had funded the Steele dossier and that a lawyer for the firm, Marc Elias, had commissioned it. The disclosure was forced by House Republicans, led by Rep. Devin Nunes, who had subpoenaed the bank records of Fusion GPS in a bid to identify its secret funder. (Fusion GPS was the opposition-research firm hired by Perkins Coie that in turn hired Steele.)

For those wedded to the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, the admission was problematic: After months of anonymous media claims that Steele’s dossier was “credible” and even “bearing out,” the heralded document was exposed as a paid partisan hit job from Trump’s political opponents. If the FBI was found to have relied on the dossier, the Clinton campaign’s key role could discredit the entire investigation.

Just before the 2017 year-end deadline for 2018 Pulitzer eligibility, the New York Times produced a new origin story for the probe that would temper these concerns and help the newspaper win the prize. The FBI’s decision to open the Trump-Russia probe had nothing to do with Steele, the Times claimed. Instead, the instigator was George Papadopoulos, a low-level campaign volunteer indicted by Mueller two months prior.

“During a night of heavy drinking at an upscale London bar in May 2016,” the Times’ piece began, Papadopoulos told an Australian diplomat named Alexander Downer that Russia had “political dirt on Hillary Clinton,” including “thousands of emails.” Papadopoulos, the Times said, had learned of the Russian scheme the previous month from Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese academic who claimed to be in touch with “high-level Russian officials.” Mifsud’s claim signaled inside knowledge of Russia’s alleged hack of the Democratic National Committee, the Times said, because at that point the “information was not yet public.”

Alexander Downer: The Australian diplomat’s account of his conversation with George Papadopoulos conflicts with the Times’ reporting. Twitter/@AlexanderDowner

When Downer, via the Australian government, relayed this information to the U.S. in July, the FBI decided to open its Trump-Russia probe, codenamed Crossfire Hurricane, the Times reported.

“The [DNC] hacking and the revelation that a member of the Trump campaign may have had inside information about it were driving factors that led the F.B.I. to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia’s attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump’s associates conspired,” the Times claimed. The article pointedly asserted that the Steele dossier “was not part of the justification to start a counterintelligence inquiry, American officials said.” (In a possible contradiction, it also claims, without specifics, “that the investigation was also propelled by intelligence from other friendly governments, including the British.”)

Several key aspects of the article have been challenged by the principals involved — leaving aside a key question the Times appears never to have asked: Why would the FBI launch a counterintelligence probe of a presidential campaign based on a barroom conversation involving a volunteer?

Moreover, the Times or its sources mischaracterized the barroom conversation, according to both of its participants. Speaking to a Sydney-based newspaper a few months later about the fateful London exchange, Downer said Papadopoulos had never mentioned “dirt” or “thousands of emails” — which the FBI would have linked to the DNC hack. Instead, Downer told The Australian, Papadopoulos “mentioned the Russians might use material that they have on Hillary Clinton in the lead-up to the election, which may be damaging.” Contrary to the specificity of the Times’ rendering, Downer recalled that Papadopoulos “didn’t say what it was.” He also said Papadopoulos made no mention of Mifsud, a mysterious figure with rumored ties to Western intelligence who vanished after a cursory FBI interview.

A declassified FBI document would later confirm Downer’s account of a vague conversation. In May 2020, the Justice Department released the July 31, 2016, FBI electronic communication (EC) that officially opened its Russia investigation. The EC states that Downer had told the U.S. government that Papadopoulos had “suggested the Trump team had received some kind of suggestion from Russia that it could assist” the Trump campaign by anonymously releasing damaging information about Clinton and President Obama. The EC made no mention of any “dirt,” “thousands of emails,” or Mifsud. It also acknowledged that the nature of the “suggestion” was “unclear” and that the possible Russian help could entail “material acquired publicly,” as opposed to hacked emails by the thousands.

Another declassified document, the December 2017 testimony from Andrew McCabe — the former FBI deputy director who helped launch and oversee the Russia probe — also undermined the Times’ premise. Asked why the FBI never sought a surveillance warrant on the Trump volunteer who supposedly sparked the investigation, McCabe replied that “Papadopoulos’ comment didn’t particularly indicate that he was the person … that was interacting with the Russians.”

Despite the countervailing claims of Downer, McCabe, and the FBI document that opened the investigation (not to mention the recollections of both Papadopoulos and Downer that they only had one drink, belying the Times claim of “a night of heavy drinking”), the Times has never run a single update or correction.

Falsehood No. 4: Russia Launched a Sweeping Interference Campaign That Posed a ‘National Security Threat’

Social media posts from Russia’s effort to “assault American democracy,” as the Times put it. HPSCI Minority

Doubting the intelligence, Trump pursues Putin
and leaves a Russian threat unchecked
By Greg Miller, Greg Jaffe and Philip Rucker
Washington Post, December 14, 2017

To Sway Vote, Russia Used Army of Fake Americans
By Scott Shane
New York Times, September 8, 2017

As the Pulitzer-winning media outlets relied on anonymous intelligence officials to fuel innuendo about Trump-Russia collusion, they turned to these same sources to imply that a compromised president was unwilling to confront the existential threat of “Russian interference.”

“Nearly a year into his presidency,” a Pulitzer-winning December 2017 Washington Post story declared, “Trump continues to reject the evidence that Russia waged an assault on a pillar of American democracy and supported his run for the White House.” As a result, Trump has “impaired the government’s response to a national security threat.”

The Post’s article was sourced to “more than 50 current and former U.S. officials” including former CIA Director Michael Hayden, who “described the Russian interference as the political equivalent of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.”

Another Pulitzer-winning story, written by Scott Shane of the New York Times two months earlier, offered a revealing window into the merits of the Russian interference allegations, and the appropriateness of equating them to attacks like 9/11.

“To Sway Vote, Russia Used Army of Fake Americans,” the Times’ headline blared. Aside from the Pulitzer board, Shane’s article also impressed the New York Times’ editors, who proclaimed in a follow-up editorial that their colleague’s “startling investigation” had revealed “further evidence of what amounted to unprecedented foreign invasion of American democracy.”

But from the details in Shane’s article, it is difficult to see why anonymous U.S. intelligence officials, Pulitzer judges, and Times editors saw the alleged Russian “cyberarmy” as such a seismic danger.

Melvin Redick, suspected Russian operator. The proof? Articles “reflecting a pro-Russian worldview,” the Times reported. New York Times

Shane’s piece opened by describing a June 2016 Facebook post by an account user named Melvin Redick, who promoted the website DC Leaks, alleged by the U.S. to be a Russian intelligence cutout. Redick’s posts, Shane writes, were “among the first public signs” of Russia’s “cyberarmy of counterfeit Facebook and Twitter accounts” that turned the platforms into “engines of deception and propaganda.” To Clint Watts, a former FBI agent turned MSNBC commentator, Russia’s infiltration of Facebook and Twitter was so dangerous that social media, he said, is now afflicted by a “bot cancer.”

But these explosive conclusions, Shane’s own piece later acknowledged, were undermined by a lack of evidence. The online users who manipulated social media, Shane quietly notes near the bottom, were in fact only “suspected Russian operators” (emphasis added). Shane’s uncertainty extends to Melvin Redick, the alleged Russian bot who begins the story. Redick is one of several identified accounts that “appeared to be Russian creations,” Shane concedes. The only proof tying Redick to Russia? “His posts were never personal, just news articles reflecting a pro-Russian worldview.”

Robert Mueller’s final report two years later also tried to raise alarm about what he called a “sweeping and systematic” Russian interference campaign. But as with the Pulitzer-winning outlets before him, the contents of his report failed to support the headline assertion. The Russian troll farm blamed for a sweeping social media campaign to install Trump spent about $46,000 on pre-election posts that were juvenile, barely about the election, and mostly appeared during the primaries. After suggesting that the troll farm was tied to the Kremlin, the Mueller team was forced to walk back that innuendo in court, and later dropped the case altogether. The other main claim regarding Russian interference – that the GRU (Russia’s foreign intelligence agency) hacked the DNC’s email servers and gave the material to Wikileaks – was quietly undermined by Mueller’s qualified language and key evidentiary gaps, as RCI reported in 2019.

The Russian hacking claim suffered an additional setback in May 2020, when testimony from the CEO of CrowdStrike — the Clinton-contracted firm that was the first to publicly accuse Russia of infiltrating the DNC — was declassified. Speaking to the House Intelligence Committee in December 2017, CrowdStrike’s Shawn Henry disclosed that his company “did not have concrete evidence” that alleged Russian hackers had stolen any data from the servers.

Despite its once exhaustive and alarmist interest in the operations of Russia’s cyber army, neither the Times nor the Post has ever reported Henry’s explosive admission. This includes Pulitzer-winning Post national security reporter Ellen Nakashima, who effectively kicked off the Russiagate saga by breaking the news on CrowdStrike’s Russian hacking allegation in June 2016. Other than Henry, Nakashima’s main source was Michael Sussmann – the Clinton campaign attorney recently indicted for lying to the FBI.

Falsehood No. 5: The Justice Department Pulled Its Punches on Trump

Justice Dept. Never Fully Examined
Trump’s Ties to Russia, Ex-Officials Say
By Michael S. Schmidt
New York Times, Aug. 30, 2020 (Updated June 9, 2021)

When Mueller ended his investigation in 2019 without charging Trump or any other associate for conspiring with Russia, a collusion-obsessed media formulated more conspiracy theories to explain away this unwelcome ending.

First came the belief that Attorney General William Barr had forced Mueller to shut down, misrepresented his final report, and hid the smoking-gun evidence behind redactions. When Mueller failed to support any of these allegations in his July 2019 congressional testimony, a new culprit was needed.

Michael S. Schmidt of the New York Times: Shared two Pulitzer prizes in 2018. Andrew Lih/Wikimedia

One year later, the New York Times found its fall guy: Mueller’s overseer, former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, had handcuffed the special counsel.

“The Justice Department secretly took steps in 2017 to narrow the investigation into Russian election interference and any links to the Trump campaign, according to former law enforcement officials, keeping investigators from completing an examination of President Trump’s decades-long personal and business ties to Russia,” Michael Schmidt reported on Aug. 30, 2020. Rosenstein, Schmidt said, “curtailed the investigation without telling the bureau, all but ensuring it would go nowhere” and preventing the FBI from “completing an inquiry into whether the president’s personal and financial links to Russia posed a national security threat.”

To buttress his case, Schmidt cited the Democrats’ leading collusion advocate, Rep. Adam Schiff, who feared that “that the F.B.I. Counterintelligence Division has not investigated counterintelligence risks arising from President Trump’s foreign financial ties.”

But as Schmidt’s article tacitly acknowledged, that outcome did not come from Rosenstein but the Mueller team itself. After Rosenstein appointed Mueller, Schmidt reported, members of the special counsel’s team “held early discussions led by the agent Peter Strzok about a counterintelligence investigation of the president.” But these “efforts fizzled,” Schmidt added, when Strzok “was removed from the inquiry three months later for sending text messages disparaging Mr. Trump.” If Rosenstein had indeed “curtailed” a counterintelligence investigation by Mueller’s team, why did the special counsel staffers discuss it, and why did it only “fizzle” upon Strzok’s exit three months later?

Strzok himself disputed the premise of Schmidt’s article.

“I didn’t feel such a limitation,” Strzok told the Atlantic. “When I discussed this with Mueller and others, it was agreed that FBI personnel attached to the Special Counsel’s Office would do the counterintelligence work, which necessarily included the president.” The only problem, Strzok added, was that by “the time I left the team, we hadn’t solved this problem of who and how to conduct all of the counterintelligence work.” Strzok’s “worry,” he added, was that the counterintelligence angle “wasn’t ever effectively done” – not that it was ever curtailed. Another key Mueller team member, lead prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, also rejected Schmidt’s claim.

NYT story today is wrong re alleged secret DOJ order prohibiting a counterintelligence investigation by Mueller, “without telling the bureau.” Dozens of FBI agents/analysts were embedded in Special Counsel’s Office and we were never told to keep anything from them. 1 of 2

— Andrew Weissmann (@AWeissmann_) August 31, 2020

Also erroneous is NYT claim “Rosenstein concluded the F.B.I. lacked sufficient reason to conduct an investigation into the president’s links to a foreign adversary.” See DOJ Special Counsel Appointment Order, para. (b)(i). 2 of 2

— Andrew Weissmann (@AWeissmann_) August 31, 2020

Rosenstein’s May 2017 scope memo, which established the parameters of Mueller’s investigation, indeed contained no such limitations. It broadly tasked Mueller to examine “any links and/or co-ordination” between the Russian government and anyone associated with the Trump campaign, as well as – even more expansively – “any matters that arose or may arise directly from that investigation.”

In his July 2019 congressional appearance, Mueller had multiple opportunities to reveal that his probe had been impeded or narrowed. Asked by Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.) whether “at any time in the investigation, your investigation was curtailed or stopped or hindered,” Mueller replied “No.” When Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) tried to lead Mueller into agreeing that he “of course … did not obtain the president’s tax returns, which could otherwise show foreign financial sources,” Mueller did not oblige. “I’m not going to speak to that,” Mueller replied.

With no curtailing or interference in the probe, perhaps Mueller never turned up any Russia-tied counterintelligence or financial concerns about Trump because there was simply none to find.

For a media establishment that had spent years promoting a Trump-Russia collusion narrative and sidelining countervailing facts, that was indeed a tough outcome to fathom.

But it’s no time for excuses or false claims of vindication: The tepid accounting spurred by the Steele dossier’s collapse should be just the start of a far more exhaustive reckoning. Broadly misleading journalism that plunged an American presidency into turmoil demands much more than piecemeal corrections.

realclearinvestigations.com

His November 25 article in The Atlantic “It Wasn’t a Hoax”, is one of several efforts to belittle the increased evidence contradicting the flawed Russiagate narrative. Frum uncritically uses David Satter as a reliable source.

Satter is propped by Frum for stating that the Russian government was behind some apartment bombings in 1999, as a means of gaining support for an armed campaign in Chechnya. Frum references Satter saying that the Steele Dossier looks like Russian government fed misinformation.

None of these claims are well substantiated. Frum completely omits the Democratic Party linked Chuck Dolan’s apparent role in the Steele Dossier – something brought up in my last article.

Frum brings up Donald Trump’s effort to make money in Russia. One senses that Trump might very well have a legit basis to contest some of what Frum says. Frum makes no mention of the Clinton Foundation making a half million dollars from Russia and Dolan having done PR work for the Russian government.

Russia has a market economy in a global order. Seeking to have business ties in that country doesn’t serve as smoking gun proof of a sinister action.

Concerning Frum’s other reference to Satter, the Russian government had no reason to risk a scandal for its second post-Soviet military operation in Chechnya. It’s a well-established fact that prior to the apartment bombings, terrorists from Chechnya were creating trouble in Dagestan, in addition to the growing lawlessness in Chechnya. Later in 2004, there was the horrific Beslan school tragedy in North Ossetia-Alania, involving children, terrorists and the effort to end that crisis.

Seen another way and within reason, these situations exhibit shades of gray, as opposed to a black-white imagery. To get as complete an analysis as possible, it’s best to have as many key views represented.

The Atlantic is a slanted commentary venue, contrasted from news media organizations professing to be great examples of journalistic reporting. Too often, some of them are more in line with The Atlantic.

So there’s no misunderstanding, I’m not against the existence of opinion outlets favoring one set of views over the other. That stance shouldn’t be confused with the selectively skewed blacklisting of certain venues because some influential politicos don’t like their content.

Trump’s administration wasn’t soft on Russia – especially when compared to Barack Obama’s period as president. Trump sought the advice of Henry Kissinger, who has suggested that the US could benefit from improved relations with Russia as an offset to China’s growing clout. The Machiavellian minded Kissinger was a key part of the Nixon administration which broke the ice with China, at a time when the Soviet Union was perceived as the stronger adversary.

By the way, Trump has had extensive business ties in China. Yet, that didn’t stop him from making pointedly critical comments against the Chinese government.

As Tucker Carlson brought up with Mike Turner (an Ohio congressman, who is heavily funded by defense contractors) and contrary to what the likes of Frum advocate, there’s a reasoned basis for the US to not automatically go against Russia on every issue. Carlson and Turner discussed the situation between Russia and Kiev regime controlled Ukraine.

A good portion of US mass media sided with Turner, in a way that ducks some realities. Kiev regime controlled Ukraine isn’t in NATO, with the US having no defense obligations for that entity, which is governed under the influence of a corrupt kleptocracy and ultra-nationalists, in contradiction to a democracy.

With Kosovo in mind, harping on the Budapest Memorandum vis-à-vis Crimea, while suggesting that the US hasn’t supported a post-Soviet era armed territorial change is pure bunk. Before Crimea’s reunification with Russia, an internationally brokered power sharing agreement involving then Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was violated by his opponents. Shortly thereafter, a regime in Kiev was undemocratically setup, which favored anti-Russian stances.

Regarding Russia-Ukraine matters and in contradiction to Frum, The Atlantic, et al., Ukrainegate appears to be the greater reality than Russiagate. There’s good reason to believe that the activity of the Russian based Internet Research Agency has been over-hyped, given its overall manner, relative to what’s known about it.

The Democratic Party connected Ukrainian-American activist Alexandra Chalupa, sought dirt on Trump. This activity included her interacting with people in Ukrainian government positions. Chalupa’s effort contributed to Paul Manafort’s arrest for financial disclosure irregularity, having nothing to do with the claimed Russian government meddling in the 2016 US presidential vote. Likewise, the claim of Manafort being some kind of a Russian government conduit is hokey.

Valeriy Chaly, Ukraine’s ambassador to the US, wrote an August 4, 2016 article which is critical of Trump. To date, there’s no Russian version of Chalupa working with the Republican National Committee to find kompromat on Hillary Clinton. Much unlike Chaly, Russian government officials typically express the preference of not being seen as favoring one US presidential candidate over the other during an election campaign.

At the time of the 2016 US presidential vote, many Russians liked what Trump said when compared to Clinton. That sentiment is understandable, but not subversive. On US-Russian relations, Clinton was overly confrontational when compared to Trump.

There’s one more thing to throw at Frum and his fellow Russiagate hoaxers. California Congressmen Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell said they have proof of Trump-Russia collusion. This proof has yet to be revealed.

The continued insistence at trying to spin the Russiagate narrative as reality, is all the more reason for US Department of Justice Special Counsel John Durham, to continue his investigation with a detailed accounting of what transpired. Then again, some folks seem set on their views no matter what happens.

eurasiareview.com

By John MCEVOY, Pablo NAVARRETE

In 1921, the Manchester Guardian’s editor, Charles Prestwich Scott, marked the newspaper’s centenary with an essay entitled “A Hundred Years.” In it, Scott declared that a newspaper’s “primary office is the gathering of news. …Comment is free, but facts are sacred.”

One hundred years on from Scott’s famous essay, and on the three-year anniversary of the Guardian’s Julian Assange/Paul Manafort story, we question whether the Guardian’s coverage of Julian Assange has honored the newspaper’s stated commitment to the truth.

Based on private communications between a Guardian correspondent and their source inside a security company at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, as well as two exclusive interviews, we trace the events behind two of the Guardian’s most explosive stories this decade.

“Russia’s secret plan to help Julian Assange escape from UK”

On September 21, 2018, the Guardian published a bombshell report entitled “Revealed: Russia’s secret plan to help Julian Assange escape from UK.” The story detailed an alleged conspiracy between Russian diplomats and WikiLeaks to illicitly smuggle Assange out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

During the months before publication, Guardian correspondent Stephanie Kirchgaessner seemed eager to connect Assange to a Russian plot to escape the embassy.

On July 12, 2018, Kirchgaessner wrote to a source at UC Global, the private security company hired by the Ecuadorian government to protect Assange and its embassy in London: “We heard that the Russians wanted to help Assange and maybe get him a diplomatic visa. This was last year. But then the plan was rejected. By the Russians or by Assange? Why? Can you help? Do you know?”

On August 30, 2018, three weeks before publication, Kirchgaessner wrote again: “Hello. I am trying you again. I want to write a story about the discussions last year to get JA out of the embassy. The talks that happened with the Russians. Can I send you some questions?”

When the article was eventually published, the authors — Kirchgaessner, Dan Collyns, and Luke Harding — claimed that “Russian diplomats held secret talks in London … with people close to Julian Assange to assess whether they could help him flee the UK” in late 2017.

Though it was acknowledged that “details of the Assange escape plan are sketchy,” the authors used two unnamed sources to assert that Fidel Narváez, the former consul at the Ecuadorian Embassy, “served as a point of contact with Moscow.”

The story appeared to add weight to the “Russiagate” narrative – the belief that the Donald Trump campaign colluded with Russia to subvert the 2016 U.S. presidential election, with help from WikiLeaks. The authors noted that the alleged escape plan “raises new questions about Assange’s ties to the Kremlin.”

The Guardian pulled out all the stops in its September 2018 report attempting to link Assange to Russia

Two individuals with first-hand knowledge of events reject the Guardian’s story, however, and provide details about what really happened in late 2017 when Assange tried to leave the embassy.

In an exclusive interview, Aitor Martinez, a lawyer who oversaw Ecuador’s effort to grant Assange diplomatic protection, explained that plans were drawn up to appoint Assange as an Ecuadorian diplomat and transport him to a third country. That way, Assange could legally leave the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he was subject to arbitrary detention and where his health was declining.

Martinez drew up a list of countries that Ecuador should approach: China, Serbia, Greece, Bolivia, Venezuela or Cuba, noting:

Of course, they were the countries that don’t have good relations with the U.S. and could accept the appointment. Russia was never, ever on that list. There was a huge conspiracy theory in the U.S. with Russiagate; it didn’t make sense. So those were the countries.”

Martinez continued:

It took two or three weeks and we didn’t get any answer from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And suddenly the Ministry said that they had appointed him to Russia.”

Foreign Minister María Fernanda Espinosa’s cousin worked at the Ecuadorian Embassy in Moscow and, through this cousin, she concocted a plan to appoint Assange to the one country that was the subject of mass-media hysteria.

“Julian and all of us at the legal team refused this appointment,” Martinez explained. “We said, ‘that’s crazy, what are you talking about?’ We refused.”

After Assange’s legal team refused, a second passport was issued to replace the diplomatic passport appointed to Russia, and Martinez personally brought the second passport to Assange at the embassy.

On December 21, Rommy Vallejo — the head of the Ecuadorian intelligence agency, Senain — visited Assange at the embassy to discuss the logistics for his transfer to a third country. Martinez said:

As soon as Vallejo arrived, he left his mobile phone at the entrance. And UC Global opened the mobile and took the IMEI code and also the sim card, as usual. Take into account that Senain was the entity that hired UC Global and this was the chief of Senain, and they spied on him.”

Martinez continued, referring to open court documents:

According to the UC Global chat, they were listening through the door and everything. They knew everything about the operation and we didn’t know they were spying on us, and reporting everything to the Americans, according to the witness declarations before the Spanish court.”

Martinez can reveal how, over the following days, the U.S. learned of Assange’s plans to leave the embassy. The Minister of Foreign Affairs called Martinez and asked:

What the hell happened? This is crazy, this operation plan was secret, was handled just by five or six people, and suddenly the U.S. ambassador in Quito came to my office and told me: ‘We know that Julian Assange is about to leave the embassy using a diplomatic passport, and we will never allow it.’”

Martinez explained that, at the time, Assange’s legal team couldn’t figure out how the Americans learned about this operation. “Now we can assume that it was because UC Global sent information about the plan. So, she [the foreign minister] said we have to stop everything because the Americans know,” he said.

At this time, the U.S. intelligence agencies were pressuring UC Global to link Assange with Russia. Martinez said:

UC Global drafted exaggerated and faked reports for the Americans. The protected [UC Global] witness claimed before a court that they had drafted exaggerated reports just to feed the Americans with information and to show that UC Global is very important for them at the embassy. If you check UC Global reports, it’s very funny; they make up everything.”

A recent Yahoo! News article suggests that these reports were taken seriously.

As well as listening through the wall, UC Global staff secretly recorded video and audio footage of Assange and Vallejo’s meeting. “They even created a Dropbox link to send it – they took the data, cut the conversation and sent it to Morales,” said Martinez. This footage was then presumably sent to Morales’s handlers in the U.S.

Surveillance footage shows Assange meeting with a confidant at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Screenshot | El Pais

On November 12, 2018, Kirchgaessner contacted a source within UC Global requesting access to the transcript of Assange’s meeting with Vallejo.

Kirchgaessner wrote: “Hola. The transcript?”

Her source responded: “In this moment its [sic] difficult I think tomorrow I can”

Kirchgaessner was thankful: “Really? That would be amazing. You know which one I mean?”

Kirchgaessner never received the transcript. Nonetheless, it is noteworthy that the Guardian knew that a security company hired to protect Assange was in fact compiling transcripts on his private meetings long before this became public knowledge, and this wasn’t treated as the story. The Guardian instead promoted a narrative that Assange’s team was conspiring with Russia to illicitly flee the embassy.

To the contrary, Martinez emphasised that Ecuador had tried to help Assange leave the embassy through legal diplomatic channels, before the U.S. caught wind of the plan through a corrupt security firm that was clandestinely spying on Assange.

“A lot of mistakes”

Fidel Narváez, former consul at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, categorically denies holding secret discussions with Russian diplomats. Narváez said:

I challenged the Guardian and I said this is false information – there was no Russian escape plan. To start with there was not an escape plan – escape, which means something clandestine, illicit, something not legal. That, there was not ever. Let alone something devised or orchestrated by a third country.”

Narváez lodged a formal complaint against the Guardian, attesting that “the Guardian has not, and cannot, substantiate with solid evidence its […] false assertions” that “Russian diplomats held secret talks in London last year;” and that “a tentative plan was devised that would have seen the WikiLeaks founder smuggled out of Ecuador’s London Embassy.”

On advice from its internal regulator, the Guardian amended the article to emphasize that “the plan in relation to Mr. Assange’s ability to be able to leave the Ecuadorian Embassy was not devised or instigated by Russia,” and that “there was nothing illicit about the ‘plan’ as described in the Article.”

Guardian admits its reporters L. Harding, S. Kirchgaessner, and D. Collyns gave a “misleading impression to readers” and breached paper’s code in one of infamous series of fake news stories about Assange from 2018 which helped put him in Belmarsh.

There will be no repercussions. pic.twitter.com/VbDE2WNPlX

— Matt Kennard (@kennardmatt) December 23, 2019

The Guardian’s climbdown from its original assertions suggests a loss of confidence in the information provided by its unnamed sources. Indeed, Kirchgaessner was warned by a source inside UC Global that the Guardian was being fed with false information from questionable sources months before the article was published.

On May 16, 2018, following the Guardian’s reporting on Operation Hotel (Ecuador’s multi-million-dollar operation to support Assange’s embassy stay), Kirchgaessner was told by a UC Global source:

I’ve read part of your article and [Ecuadorian news agency] plan V; there are a lot of mistakes and things that are confused or mixed; there are people who have provided that information so you do not know why they have given that …”

Perhaps more concerningly, Kirchgaessner appeared to know about the relationship between UC Global’s activities at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and the security company’s proximity to Trump megadonor Sheldon Adelson almost a year before it became public knowledge.

UC Global’s loyalties had shifted in 2016, when its CEO David Morales attended a security fair in Las Vegas and won a contract to guard Queen Miri, a multi-million-dollar yacht owned by Adelson. “Given that Adelson already had a substantial security team assigned to guard him and his family at all times,” wrote Max Blumenthal, “the contract between UC Global and Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands was clearly the cover for a devious espionage campaign apparently overseen by the CIA.” Blumenthal continued:

Throughout the black operations campaign, U.S. intelligence appears to have worked through Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands, a company that had previously served as an alleged front for a CIA blackmail operation several years earlier. The operations formally began once Adelson’s hand-picked presidential candidate, Donald Trump, entered the White House in January 2017.

The relationship between Adelson and UC Global’s operations at the Ecuadorian Embassy was first reported in El País in September 2019. Yet on October 12, 2018, Kirchgaessner emailed her source within UC Global: “Also the [Las Vegas] Sands and Sheldon Adelson – did he pay for the embassy to move?”

If Kirchgaessner knew about the relationship between Adelson and UC Global’s activities at the Ecuadorian Embassy, why was it not reported at the time? Indeed, evidence of an elaborate spying operation on Assange, with links to the Republican Party and the Trump administration, would seem to disrupt the narrative of a secret Assange-Trump-Russia plot to subvert American politics – a narrative that the Guardian would not abandon easily.

“Manafort held secret talks with Assange in Ecuadorian Embassy”

On November 27, 2018, while Narváez’s formal complaint to the Guardian about its Assange coverage was still being processed, the newspaper published another blockbuster story claiming that Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s campaign manager and key aide during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, had “held secret talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London” in 2013, 2015, and Spring 2016.

The story was immediately picked up by the world’s largest news outlets, including CNN, MSNBC, the Daily Mail, and the Los Angeles Times. “If it’s right,” commented a U.S. national security reporter, “it might be the biggest get this year.”

Indeed, the article appeared to provide additional evidence of “collusion” between WikiLeaks, Trump, and Russia in the lead-up to the 2016 U.S. election, during which time WikiLeaks released thousands of Democratic National Committee emails.

As the article’s authors, Luke Harding and Dan Collyns, claimed, the last alleged meeting between Assange and Manafort in Spring 2016 “is likely to come under scrutiny and could interest Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor who is investigating alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.”

The Guardian’s Manafort scoop began to unravel almost as soon as it was published.

Remember this day when the Guardian permitted a serial fabricator to totally destroy the paper’s reputation. @WikiLeaks is willing to bet the Guardian a million dollars and its editor’s head that Manafort never met Assange. https://t.co/R2Qn6rLQjn

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) November 27, 2018

The WikiLeaks Twitter account responded: “Remember this day when the Guardian permitted a serial fabricator to totally destroy the paper’s reputation. @WikiLeaks is willing to bet the Guardian a million dollars and its editor’s head that Manafort never met Assange.” Both Manafort and Assange denied that any of the visits took place.

Indeed, even the Guardian didn’t seem sure.

Though the Guardian’s sources were able to offer precise details about Manafort’s appearance (“casually dressed when he exited the embassy, wearing sandy-coloured chinos, a cardigan and a light-coloured shirt”) as well as the meeting’s duration (it “lasted about 40 minutes”), the authors were unable to establish exactly when Manafort allegedly visited.

Within a request for comment sent to WikiLeaks shortly before the article was published, Harding was not even able to specify during which month Manafort’s 2016 visit supposedly occurred. The meeting “took place,” Harding wrote, “in or around March 2016, around the time Manafort joined Donald Trump’s presidential campaign,” a detail that remained vague within the published article.

In the time since, the Guardian appears to have lost even more confidence in its own report.

Within hours of publication, the Guardian modified its headline to add “sources say” to the original claim that “Manafort held secret talks with Assange in Ecuadorian embassy.” The print edition, issued one day after online publication, added inverted commas: “Manafort ‘held secret talks with Assange’.”

Remember this day when the Guardian permitted a serial fabricator to totally destroy the paper’s reputation. @WikiLeaks is willing to bet the Guardian a million dollars and its editor’s head that Manafort never met Assange. https://t.co/R2Qn6rLQjn

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) November 27, 2018

The main body of the report was also modified. Whereas the original claimed that “It is unclear why Manafort wanted to see Assange and what was discussed,” an updated version read that “It is unclear why Manafort would have wanted to see Assange and what was discussed.” [emphasis added]

Harding’s 2020 book, Shadow State: Murder, Mayhem, and Russia’s Remaking of the West, moreover, makes no mention of Manafort’s alleged meetings with Assange, even though the subject matter’s clear focus is malign Russian involvement in Western politics. Mueller did not mention the alleged meeting in his report on Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Despite watering down the article’s key claims, the Guardian has yet to add any correction notes or provide a retraction.

Visitor’s log

In paragraph 14 of the Guardian’s Manafort story, the authors note that: “Visitors normally register with embassy security guards and show their passports. Sources in Ecuador, however, say Manafort was not logged.”

It is curious that the Guardian glided over this crucial point. Narváez, who was in charge of the day-to-day functioning of the embassy, asserted that nobody could enter the building without being logged. Visitors required written approval from the ambassador, before registering their visit with security personnel and leaving a copy of their identification, which would be added to the visitor’s log.

Private UC Global discussions raise even more questions.

On November 22, 2018, five days before the Guardian published its Manafort story, an email was sent from UC Global CEO David Morales, asking: “Do we have a record that Paul Manafort during 2013, 2015, and 2016 visited the embassy?” UC Global staff discussed the matter:

Staff A: Hello… send me the name to search for

Staff B: Paul Manafort

Staff A: Ok, I’ll look and let you know

Any date?

I can’t find anything

Staff B: So there’s nothing?

Staff A: I can only find two Pauls… Stafford and Nigel

It seems that the Guardian’s request for information on visits to the embassy was flushed through Ecuadorian intelligence to UC Global and came back negative. Why did the Guardian glide over crucial evidence that contradicted its key claim, without offering any attempt at explaining why Manafort was not in the visitor’s log?

Indeed, the Guardian had relied on the visitor’s log for a separate story, and had privileged access to it.

On May 6, 2018, Kirchgaessner contacted a source within UC Global, saying:

I am interested in Nigel Farage because he went to see [Assange] once in 2017 and said it was the only time he went to see him. But other people think he went more and I am interested in knowing if that is true. Farage pushed for Brexit and he was also close to the Trump campaign.”

On May 18, 2018, Kirchgaessner emailed once more: “Have you seen what we published this week in the Guardian? We didn’t include the name of the company [UC Global]. […] Could you send me the list of visitors for the first week [sic] of 2016 (January – June 2016)?”

It is also curious that no video or photo evidence of Manafort’s alleged visit was provided, especially given that the Guardian had lines to access the embassy’s CCTV records.

On May 14, 2018, Kirchgaessner emailed a source at UC Global, asking: “Can you bring the video again of him [Assange] outside when you come [to a meeting] tomorrow?” Four days later, Kirchgaessner emailed again: “We are very interested in the video of JA [Julian Assange] outside. Do you think that you could get the film in a few weeks?”

If the Guardian could access CCTV footage at the embassy, why was it not able to provide material evidence of Manafort’s alleged visit? Did the Guardian even ask?

Concealed author

To this day, the online version of the Guardian’s Manafort story presents only two authors: Luke Harding and Dan Collyns.

In early December 2018, however, WikiLeaks wrote that the Guardian had “mysteriously hid[den the] third author of fabricated front page story” – Ecuadorian political activist and journalist Fernando Villavicencio.

In 2014, the Ecuadorian government pointed the finger at Villavicencio for providing the Guardian with allegedly forged documents relating to a secret $1billion “deal with a Chinese bank to drill for oil under the Yasuni national park in the Amazon.”

Even before the Guardian’s Manafort story was published, Villavicencio had promoted doubtful claims about Assange’s visitors at the Ecuadorian Embassy. On May 16, 2018, Villavicencio and Cristina Solórzano correctly wrote in La Fuente that “[Nigel] Farage visited Assange in March of last year, stayed for roughly 40 minutes and when asked about why he visited, responded ‘I don’t remember’.”

However, they added that, according to their source, “Farage returned to the embassy the next month, entering 28 April 2018 at 17:10 and leaving at 19:40.”

The allegation was almost certainly false. In late March 2018, the Ecuadorian authorities had removed Assange’s access to the outside world, including a ban on visitors. These rights were only partially restored in October 2018, meaning Farage had supposedly visited while Assange could not accept visitors.

Questions

A number of crucial questions remain unanswered by the Guardian:

• What did Kirchgaessner know about the relationship between UC Global, Sheldon Adelson, and the Ecuadorian Embassy security operation in 2018, before this was public knowledge? Why was this not reported on at the time?
• Why did the Guardian not report on the fact that Assange’s private conversations were being transcribed by a security company that was supposed to be protecting him?
• Did the Guardian continue to use sources in Ecuador’s intelligence service after it was warned that they were spreading disinformation?
• Given that the Guardian had lines to access CCTV footage at the Ecuadorian Embassy, did it try to attain material evidence of Manafort’s alleged visit? If not, why?
• Why has the Guardian not added any correction notes or provided a retraction to its Manafort story?
• Why is the third author of the Manafort story, Fernando Villavicencio, still not listed on the Guardian’s website? Why was he seen as a reputable journalist to cover Assange?

Until these questions are answered, the newspaper cannot credibly defend itself against the charge that it has committed serious journalistic malpractice in its coverage of Julian Assange.

mintpressnews.com