In the wake of Watergate, we were told — most often by the Washington Post and the New York Times — how a strong “investigative” media is our society’s watchdog, holding the powerful accountable, ensuring a well-functioning democracy. But what if the media did just the opposite, using its “investigative” skills to aid the powerful not only in hiding their misdeeds, but in actively assisting in their commission?
Their Pulitzer Prize–winning “Russiagate” reporting, sadly, is a case in point.
The first significant Russiagate reporting was in June 2016, of a claim by the Clinton campaign that Putin’s Russia had “hacked and leaked” DNC emails, soon to be published by WikiLeaks. Putin’s motive, as told by the campaign, was to help Trump and hurt Clinton, a slant immediately adopted by the Post and Times.
But the claim was supposedly proven by Clinton’s own private cyber-consultant, CrowdStrike. An unschooled observer would ask if, indeed, one of our more reviled adversaries did this, shouldn’t the campaign have engaged the FBI to examine the server and verify that this was in fact a criminal foreign hack? Our two great daily papers did not ask that obvious question.
Since the emails by all accounts showed Hillary cheating rival Bernie Sanders, and since she used the Putin angle to divert attention from the cheating, a middlingly intelligent journalist would have questioned whether this had been more likely a “Bernie Bro” leak. Withholding the server from the FBI would appear to be a dead giveaway of a cover-up of an electoral dirty trick. The Post and Times, of course, wished no harm to any opponent of Trump.
Soon, a very disturbing event occurred on July 10, 2016, twelve days before WikiLeaks would release the emails as promised. A young DNC employee, Seth Rich, was shot in the back. His watch, wallet, phone, and gold chain were not disturbed, thus ruling out robbery as a motive.
WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, after leaking the damning-to-Hillary emails, firmly stated that Russia was not the source of these documents. More significantly, he stated how much WikiLeaks fiercely protects its sources, whereupon he offered a reward of $20,000 for information identifying Seth Rich’s killer. While any sensible person would see that this was tantamount to an admission that Rich was the likely leaker, the Post and Times were careful not to connect Seth Rich to the leaked emails.
After Trump was elected, the Obama intelligence agencies adopted the “hack and leak” theory in its Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), which we now know to have been deliberately falsified at the behest of President Obama. But even before this corruption was publicly known, the left-leaning publication The Nation skeptically noted that in accepting this weak claim, the ICA stated, “Judgments are not intended to imply that we have proof that shows something to be a fact.”
To dramatize the Putin hoax, in December 2016, the Obama administration expelled thirty-five Russian diplomats, resulting in an increasingly perilous state of U.S.-Russia relations. In essence, the Post and the Times were causing a new “red scare” of a modern McCarthyism, all to push the juvenile theory that Trump loved Putin.
On July 24, 2017, the entire foundation of Russiagate should have been destroyed by an impressive report from the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), which showed that the emails could not have been “hacked” from the outside, but rather “leaked” from the inside, as demonstrated by the high speeds of exfiltration.
Moreover, VIPS proved that an unidentified agent calling himself “Guccifer 2.0,” who claimed to be the source for WikiLeaks, had falsely inserted Russian markings on a few downloaded (not hacked) emails, to pin any WikiLeaks publication as Russian-sourced. In other words, VIPS not only showed the emails to have been internally leaked, but also proved that whoever did had attempted to falsely pin any publication on Russia. This July 2017 VIPS report should have immediately taken the starch out of the embryonic Mueller Russiagate investigation. But the Post and Times buried it.
The most consequential Russiagate reporting was after Trump’s election, clearly meant to destabilize his presidency. The first big Russiagate story in Trump’s first term was the now entirely debunked Steele Dossier. One would think that these two journals would listen to the lionized former Post managing editor, Bob Woodward, who called the dossier “a garbage document.”
Buttressing Woodward’s commonsensical conclusion was one “fact” that Steele presented, namely, that the conspiracy was carried out in part through the Russian consulate in Miami. Unfortunately, there was no Russian consulate in Miami, an impossibility which the Post and the Times ignored.
The Dossier claimed Carter Page, a patriotic Annapolis grad, was an alleged Russian agent because he had agreed with Igor Sechin of Russia’s Rosneft to be paid 19% of Rosneft, a Russian oil company, if Page enabled the removal of US sanctions on Russia. This cartoonish allegation would mean that Page would receive $2 billion, an absurdity never highlighted by either paper. This allegation enabled the FBI’s string of FISA warrants, in turn allowing electronic surveillance of Carter Page’s cellphone calls and emails.
It would have taken some reporter at the Post or Times about five minutes to learn that under FISA’s surveillance warrants, the government gets at least two “jumps” from the surveilled agent. That is, the government can surveil all with whom Page communicated, and then also surveill everyone with whom the first group communicated. These two “jumps” enabled electronic surveillance of Trump Tower.
In March 2017, Trump sensationally claimed that Trump Tower had been “wiretapped.” Immediately, the Post and Times belittled Trump’s claims by quoting the likes of DNI James Clapper. Technically, because cellphones and emails do not involve wires, there was no old-fashioned wiretapping. But as normal folks use the term, Trump’s claim was true.
Several months after the first leak of the Steele Dossier, it was discovered through public filings that the Clinton campaign had funded it through Clinton campaign lawyers. Despite obvious proof of this funding, the Post and the Times quoted respectfully the obviously dishonest denials from the campaign’s lawyers.
Now, knowing that the Steele Dossier, so highly touted, was itself likely a campaign dirty trick, neither the Post nor the Times connected the dots that the false Dossier was used to falsely predicate counterintelligence spying on Trump and to draft of a slanted ICA, in turn causing an international crisis after the Russian diplomats were expelled.
A story then leaked that Donald Trump, Jr. had been lured to the infamous “Trump Tower meeting” in June 2016 with Russian government lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, on the promise of proof of an undescribed Clinton crime, whereas the lawyer merely lobbied against certain sanctions.
Common sense would argue that if the Russian government needed to trick a Trump agent into a meeting, there likely had been no ongoing collusion. But did either of these two outlets come to that commonsense inference? Of course not. Instead, they both reported the Trump Tower meeting as evidence of collusion, as opposed to proving lack of any collusion.
Finally, the papers breathlessly reported that a “Russian-connected” Professor Joseph Mifsud had conveyed to young Trump aide George Papadopoulos that Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton through her emails, a communication that eventually became the basis for the FBI’s opening of the “Crossfire Hurricane” counterintelligence investigation that spied on Trump.
Whereas the two papers breathlessly touted Mifsud as a foreign Russian agent, a twelve-year-old with a computer would have learned that Mifsud was a U.K. asset and co-professor at a European university with one Claire Smith, the U.K.’s chief spy-vetting official. Any sensible reporter, therefore, would have seen that Mifsud was a plant by American foreign intelligence ally U.K. to justify the false predication of a counterintelligence operation designed to validate Clinton’s canard. But these two incompetent newspapers failed to find what an intelligent twelve-year-old would have concluded.
Let’s summarize what the New York Times and Washington Post knew or should have known prior to their April 2018 Pulitzer Prizes. With common sense, they should have concluded that Hillary Clinton, to cover up for her DNC fraud on Bernie Sanders, invented the “Putin hack-and-leak” story to defraud delegates and then voters. They should have known that the Steele Dossier was a dirty campaign trick turned into a slimy intelligence agency weapon against Trump. The papers should have known that the Dossier was, per Woodward, “garbage” collated by a seeming Russian spy, Igor Danchenko.
But if they had played it straight, Trump’s presidency would not have been marred with scandal, and he certainly would have been re-elected, given his excellent pre-COVID economy, a lack of foreign aggression, and control of the border. However, these two prestigious papers, as they arrogated to themselves the power to make and break kings, wielded these bogus claims to influence the 2020 election. The results of their partisan incompetence are there for all to see.
Besides aiding and abetting the sickening corruption of our major intelligence agencies, the reverberating effect of the Russiagate reporting from the Washington Post and New York Times, resulting in the 2020 Biden election, is still felt today from past inflation, a border invasion, the war in Ukraine, the Afghanistan pullout, and our assistance to Iran.
These two papers cannot argue that their reporting was inconsequential. They have boasted otherwise for years, simply denying the truly harmful consequences. It will have to suffice for America to view any Pulitzer Prize as a form of scarlet letter: I for incompetence.
John D. O’Connor is a former federal prosecutor and the San Francisco attorney who represented W. Mark Felt during his revelation as Deep Throat in 2005. O’Connor is the author of the books Postgate: How the Washington Post Betrayed Deep Throat, Covered Up Watergate and Began Today’s Partisan Advocacy Journalism and The Mysteries of Watergate: What Really Happened.
Image via Pxhere.