Tag: russiagate

The Corrupt Media Did Not Fall For The Russia Collusion Hoax. They Were Part Of It

Soon after Special Counsel John Durham indicted Igor Danchenko, the “Primary Sub-Source” of the Steele dossier, on five counts of lying to the FBI, the press paused to feign a moment of public introspection. The corrupt media’s attempt to frame their failings as mere confirmation bias, however, holds no truer than the Russia-collusion hoax they peddled for five years.

The proof of this reality is seen in the prostitute sex tapes: the non-existent “golden showers” one and the verifiable, but ignored, Hunter Biden videos.

The first step of what appeared, at least momentarily, to be the kick-off of a mea culpa parade came earlier this month when the Washington Post amended large segments of two articles covering the Russia-collusion storyline, one from March 2017 and the second from February 2019.

Both articles had named Sergei Millian, a Belarusian-American businessman, as the individual identified as “Source D” in the Steele dossier. While Millian had long denied speaking with Danchenko or having any role in the dossier, it was only after Durham charged the Russian-born Danchenko and former Brookings Institute employee with lying about receiving a telephone call from Millian that the Post and other media outlets removed the claims.

Then, last week, The New York Times ran a “guest essay” by professor of journalism and former Columbia Journalism School dean Bill Grueskin, headlined, “How Did So Much of the Media Get the Steele Dossier So Wrong?”

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Glenn Greenwald torches ‘amoral sociopath’ Adam Schiff for remaining defiant after hyping Steele dossier

Greenwald, who has long been skeptical of the Russian collusion narrative and outspoken of the media’s uncritical coverage, torched the top Democratic lawmaker for his defiant stance. 

“Look at what an amoral sociopath Adam Schiff is,” Greenwald reacted. “He spent years promoting the Steele Dossier. He read it into the Congressional Record. He lied about the ‘smoking gun’ evidence he saw (that Mueller never found). Watch how he worms his way around to avoid even an iota of mea culpa.”

He added, “Notable that Adam Schiff — who appears on every CNN, MSNBC and Sunday morning network news program as often as possible — just had his first truly adversarial questioning about his pathological Russiagate lies not on any of those networks but from Morgan Ortagus on the View.”

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Anatomy of a media hit job — how press pushed Clinton’s lies against Trump

Russiagate has fallen apart, with special counsel John Durham exposing the notorious Steele Dossier as a collection of lies and made-up stories. But you wouldn’t know it by reading most of the media, which have mostly ignored the story.

More importantly, they haven’t faced up to their own part in pushing this witch hunt. Relying on one anonymous source — ex-British spy Christopher Steele — they spun a supposed conspiracy between Donald Trump and Russia. But they never revealed the fact that Steele was being paid by Hillary Clinton’s campaign for opposition research, and they never examined Steele’s sources, who were unreliable or nonexistent.

Here’s how the media amplified Steele’s baseless claims to create hysteria. None of these stories have been updated, no corrections have been made.

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‘They deliberately lied’: Glenn Greenwald torches top liberal media outlets over ‘Russiagate’ and ‘collusion’

Investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald is an old-fashioned liberal…in other words, he leans left but he’s not a lunatic like the current breed. This weekend, Greenwald eviscerated the so-called “mainstream” media for continuing to push the narrative that former president Donald Trump colluded with Russia during the 2016 presidential election, BizPacReview reports.

Sunday morning, Greenwald made three primary points in a Twitter thread.

“The vast majority of disinformation, propaganda, and lies that flooded the country over the last 5 years did not come from MAGA boomers on Facebook or 4Chan teenagers but the largest and most influential liberal corporate media outlets,” Greenwald wrote.

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ABC News Takes the Prize — for Dishonest Journalism

Given all we know now, a program informed by basic journalistic ethics should have exposed the mix of partisan politics and Trump derangement syndrome that led many in the highest reaches of media and government to countenance Steele’s absurd claims. What we need is a postmortem. Instead, we get a resurrection.

The first 50 minutes of the 68-minute program are a love letter to this former MI6 agent turned gun for hire. As ominous music plays in the background, it portrays Steele as a suave and tireless truth seeker – we even get a James Bond clip to make the point. Following a treacly account of his beloved first wife, who died young, a parade of associates assure us that Steele was the best of the best while spying in Russia for the British government and then as a private intelligence contractor after he left the service in 2009.

One of those clients was the FBI. With blazing dishonesty, ABC News suggests his work was pivotal in exposing Russia’s corrupt scheme to host the soccer World Cup in 2018. In fact, DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz reported in 2019 that “Steele did not have any role in the [FIFA] investigation itself, he did not provide court testimony, and his information did not appear in any indictments, search warrants, or other court filings.”  

Having falsely established Steele’s bona fides, George Stephanopoulos allows him to repeat his anti-Trump smears while merely noting here and there that not everyone agrees with his view.

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Joe Biden & The Disappearing Elephant: How To Make A Full-Sized Scandal Vanish In Front Of An Audience Of Millions

This week marked the anniversary of one of the greatest political tricks in history: the disappearance of Hunter Biden scandal. 

New emails were released that added new details to what was a raw influence peddling operation that netted millions from foreign sources. A new tranche of emails connecting President Joe Biden to key accounts prove just how this political sleight of hand was worthy of Houdini. After all, Houdini only made an elephant disappear. The Bidens made the equivalent to an entire circus disappear in front of an audience of millions.

How Houdini made his 10,000 pound elephant Jennie disappear every night in New York’s Hippodrome remains a matter of some debate. There are no good pictures of his famous cabinet and Houdini later threatened to sue those claiming “disappearing elephants.”  What is clear is that the sheer size and the audacity of the act (like that of the Bidens) contributed to the trick. The fact is that Jennie never left the large cabinet, people just didn’t see it.

The Bidens achieved the same effect. They made a full-sized scandal disappear with the help of media and members who did not want the public to see it.  Twitter banned postings about the laptop until after Biden was elected. The media dismissed the story as a conspiracy theory with some mocking the “New York Post and everyone else who got suckered into the ridiculous Hunter Biden Laptop story. Take a bow.”

Committee Chairman Adam Schiff assured that public that “this whole smear on Joe Biden comes from the Kremlin.”

Some 50 former intelligence officials, including Obama’s CIA directors John Brennan and Leon Panetta, also insisted the laptop story was likely the work of Russian intelligence.

The laptop is, of course, now recognized as genuine even by some of the early deniers. Hunter remains under criminal investigation for possible tax and money laundering violations. But the greatest “reveal” is the person referred to as “the Big Guy” and “Celtic” in these emails: President Biden.

Recently released emails reference payments to President Biden from son’s accounts and indicate the possible commingling of funds.  Even more embarrassing, the shared account may have been used to pay a Russian prostitute named “Yanna.” In one text, a former secret service agent warns Hunter (who was holed up with a prostitute in an expensive hotel) “Come on H this is linked to Celtic’s account.”

The question is whether prosecutors will continue to act like they do not see the elephant.

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Your Steele Dossier Cheat Sheet

Now that former MI-6 intelligence officer Christopher Steele has resurfaced in a ridiculous interview with George Stephanopoulos, I thought it would be useful to re-post a piece I did providing a summary of the Dossier. Steele’s Dossier is a sloppy fabrication. Read the following and decide for yourself.

The revelations following the release of the FISA application on Saturday, 21 July 2016, requires an update to a piece I wrote last December on the  Steele Dossier, which was written to create the narrative that Donald Trump was under the thumb of the Russians. There now is no doubt that FBI and DOJ officials  were collaborating with the Intelligence Community, under the direction of Jim Clapper, in misleading members of Congress and feeding the media about alleged collusion between Donald Trump’s campaign and the Russians. At least we now know for certain that the FISA judges were informed that the information came from a source hired by the Democrats to go after Donald Trump. How those judges could acquiesce to such blatant partisan bullshit is grist for another day.

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The “17 Intelligence Community Agencies” Canard on Russian Interference

CANARD–a false or unfounded report or story; especially :  a fabricated report. That’s how Merriam Dictionary defines the term and it certainly seems to be a dandy word to describe the claim that Russia interfered in the 2016 Presidential election and that the 17 U.S. intelligence agencies agree.

As John Durham’s investigation of the origins of Russia gate continues to chug along, I thought it would be helpful to revisit the huge canard–i.e., that Russia tried to tip the 2016 election to Trump.

I nominate Hillary Clinton as The Queen of the Canard. We now know, thanks to John Durham’s indictment of Hillary’s lawyer, Michael Sussmann, that Hillary and her campaign adopted and implemented a political smear in the summer of 2016 to portray Donald Trump as a proxy of Russia’s Vladimir Putin. This lie did not stop with the election of Trump in November 2016. In May 2017, during an interview by Walt Mossberg at the CODE conference, Hillary still was eager to feed the lie that Russia ensured Donald Trump’s victory and  cited “17” U.S. intelligence agencies as her evidence:

Hillary: Now, the question is, where and how did the Russians get into this? And I think it’s a very important question. So, I assume that a lot of people here may have — and if you haven’t, I hope you will — read the declassified report by the Intelligence community that came out in early January.

TRENDING: EXCLUSIVE: Coomer Deposition Released! Verifies Antifa Facebook Posts, Extreme Left Bias

Mossberg: This is 17 agencies …

Hillary: Seventeen agencies, all in agreement, which I know from my experience as a Senator and Secretary of State, is hard to get. They concluded with high confidence that the Russians ran an extensive information war campaign against my campaign, to influence voters in the election. They did it through paid advertising we think, they did it through false news sites, they did it through these thousand agents, they did it through machine learning, which you know, kept spewing out this stuff over and over again. The algorithms that they developed. So that was the conclusion. And I think it’s fair to ask, how did that actually influence the campaign? And how did they know what messages to deliver?

Hillary was knowingly liying, but she could feign fconfusion about this supposed fact given by pointing to the joint statement issued 7 October 2016 by the Director of National Intelligence and the Director of Homeland Security:

The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow—the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.

But this was a lie. It was not a legitimate judgement of the U.S. intelligence community and did not reflect the views of 17 separate U.S. intelligence agencies. Why?

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NYT Gives Russia-Gate CPR – WSJ Pronounces It Dead

Special Council John Durham’s indictment of Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann met differing reactions Friday from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Those who may still think it was Russia that “interfered” with the 2016 election owe it to themselves to read the Sussmann indictment/charging document.

Spoiler: It was the very top officials of the Clinton campaign aided by a lawyer crooked as a hound’s hind leg that interfered in 2016. The tricks tried by Sussmann and associates might make even GOP “strategists” like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove blush.

One must recall that back in 2016 the Clinton campaign folks and their well-heeled coterie of attorneys were sure Mrs. Clinton would win. As the Sussmann charging document shows, there was some expectation of high-level posting in the “incoming” Clinton administration and – alas – absolutely no thought of indictment. This goes a long way to explain the brazenness of it all.

As discredited former FBI Director James Comey put it in his apologia-sans-apology book, A Higher Loyalty, “I was making decisions in an environment where Hillary Clinton was sure to be the next president …” Needless to say, a Clinton presidency would confer automatic immunity on key campaign miscreants and lawyers like Sussmann. Worse still for them, it appears likely that others of their breed may also find themselves criminally referred to the Department of Justice.

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