293

Certainly use this chapter-interesting reading the Alfa Bank stuff in light of what we know now after Sussman-EW’s commentary, etc

 

UPDATE with references later

https://evilsax.pressbooks.com/wp/wp-admin/post.php?post=3023&action=edit

Who can forget that front page after Comey’s ‘extremely careless’ memo on October 28, 2016 that the FBI may-or may not-be reopening the Emailgate investigation as they had ‘discovered’ new emails which may or may not have had the mythical ‘golden emails’ in them that would somehow square the circle and prove Clinton guilty of some kind of monstrous crimes-though it was pretty clear from when the probe opened in July, 2015 they would not be able to prove criminal wrongdoing on her part? 

FN: See also Chapter No Probable Cause

In other words,-as noted in previous chapter; find it Mike- Emailgate was opened despite the fact that the FBI never had close to probable cause in opening it.

We cover this in chapter No Probable Cause

And if the conduct of Comey and the FBI was extremely carelessness, so was the conduct of the NYTimes during the entire fiasco. They were always ready to connect the most unlikely dots and assume Clinton guilty now and ask questions later. The Times, of course, was the first to report Emailgate in March of 2015-just as it was first out on Whitewater-and just like with Whitewater it’s reporting was a sloppy mess. Repeatedly the Times had to correct itself after getting out in front on the latest accusations. While it would admit it got facts wrong it would never admit that this changed the central thesis of this anti Clinton reporting. Nothing could ever change the thesis.

FN: This is the MSM model-with the Times as guilty of the worst excesses of it: decide on a narrative-mirror mirror on the wall who’s the most savvy and viewless of them all? Chapter A-and then no matter what new facts emerge insist that the underlying narrative hasn’t changed meaningfully.

Oops Baquet’s Times is doing it again-playing false equivalence between Trump threatening to extort Ukraine if they don’t prosecute Trump’s political opponent and the fake scandal Trump was pushing Ukraine to assist him on concerning Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.

Ken Vogel is determined to insist that the alleged scandal around Biden’s son deserves to be spoken in the same breath as Trump’s attempted extortion to engage a foreign power in election collusion.

Alas the Washington Post-usually not as bad as the Times-also got caught up in this rabbit hole.

End of FN

The Times was first to wrongly report in July, 2015 that she was under investigation, it was a review of State Department’s email records system. Indeed, until the end Clinton was never the subject of the investigation despite the media wrongly presuming that she was.

For more on this story check out Lanny Davis’ excellent book linked above-see chapters 2-3 specifically on how the Times was as ‘extremely careless’ as the FBI.

Then there was the absolute dog’s breakfast of how the Times reported the alleged big scandal at the Clinton Foundation. It turned out that the great wrong was when Bill Clinton went to North Korea to free a couple of journalists someone wanted-but didn’t get-free airline tickets.

FN: Indeed, while the comparison between Hunter Biden and Emailgate are totally on point it bears a very close an uncanny resemblance to the sad attempt of the Times to create a furor around this nothingburger story over a rebuffed request for a diplomatic passport. 

Of course, this was a heroic act on the part of Bill Clinton but the Times was determined to turn it into Watergate based on someone wanting-not-even getting-a perk.

FN: Similarly the big picture regarding Hunter Biden is this Ukrainian prosecutor should have been fired as he wasn’t doing a very good job fighting corruption-not because he was doing a great job and so Biden fired him to protect his son-I won’t say anything more about this fake scandal so as not to give it the air it doesn’t deserve.. OTOH the current Ukrainian President is much more serious-which is why Trump’s attempt to get him to collude against Biden failed.

Is it the case that the allegedly ‘liberal NY Times’ is actually-like the Russian government-biased against Hillary Clinton and in favor of Donald Trump? Well, as we’ve discussed a lot lately regarding the Mueller probe-as well as the Kavanaugh fiasco-a tricky thing in investigations is proving intent.

We can ask why the Times coverage has for 25 years always made the least charitable assumptions regarding the Clintons while Trump himself actually gets the benefit of the doubt. But this is what the coverage has been. We can-and should-hypothesize about. But there’ s no doubt that whatever the reason for this deep Clinton Derangement Syndrome, it’s clearly a 25 year fact.

In general it became clear during 2016 that there was that for Beltway journalists there was the  Clinton Rules and the Trump Rules. The Clinton Rules is what would be treated as a misdemeanor at best for normal politicians is treated like a felony for Clintons while the Trump Rules are what would be treated like a felony for normal politicians was treated like a misdemeanor at best for Trump.

While the Times headlines and exposes always presumed the worst possible interpretation for the Clintons-the caveats being left way down in paragraph 50-with Trump despite the clear empirical fact that he’s a pathological liar, he has gotten the benefit of the doubt with the MSM and does so to this day.

This is certainly true of the Times who yet again has written a big expose that errs in the illegitimate ‘President’s’ favor. Indeed, while Trump slurs the Times as the ‘failing NY Times’ his favorite court stenographer is clearly Maggie Haberman, who bends her back so far to give Trump the benefit of the doubt it’s amazing she hasn’t hurt herself. She’s done it again.

Yes, amazing yet true. And this is particularly amazing as it directly bears on one of the Time’s biggest failures of 2016-so bad it has even acknowledged this itself. 

FN: At least the former Public Editor Liz Spayd acknowledged it. Baquet didn’t care much for her introspection and not only got rid of her he did away with having a public editor altogether.

It was how three days after the absurd storm and stress over Comey’s ‘maybe maybe not’ repopening Emailgate, the Times had another piece that did everything it could to douse the idea that Trump’s campaign was being investigated for Russian collusion. No doubt, this with the eager ‘help’ of rogue Trump agents within the FBI.

With Clinton, whatever the content of the piece, the headline always used the most hyperbolically uncharitable interpretation. This erroneous piece on the other hand had the now infamous title:

“Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia.”

One of the two authors of this very misleading piece was Eric Lichtblau. What’s amazing, is that yesterday’s misleading post by Haberman led Franklin Foer to share his own experience with the Russia story at the same time and it directly bears onto what happened regarding Lichtblau’s piece.

Ok, let’s look first at Haberman’s piece, It was a bombshell revelation that Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s deputy, Rick Gates-who has since pled guilty in the Mueller probe and testified against Manafort for his financial crimes and tax evasion also was involved in the possible collusion side of the campaign, which is a point that I made during the trial of Manafort-Mueller’s real interest in Gates is about  collusion. 

Now we see Rick Gates reportedly colluding with foreign interests to manipulate the election. 

“A top Trump campaign official requested proposals in 2016 from an Israeli company to create fake online identities, to use social media manipulation and to gather intelligence to help defeat Republican primary race opponents and Hillary Clinton, according to interviews and copies of the proposals.”

FN: Soon after I first wrote this in October, 2018 we started to learn that Manafort was  indeed intricately involved in the collusion side of the campaign-with the release of the Mueller Report his implication with collusion was deep-so deep that he never came clean with Mueller on how just how deep it went.

“The campaign official, Rick Gates, sought one proposal to use bogus personas to target and sway 5,000 delegates to the 2016 Republican National Convention by attacking Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, Mr. Trump’s main opponent at the time. Another proposal describes opposition research and “complementary intelligence activities” about Mrs. Clinton and people close to her, according to copies of the proposals obtained by The New York Times and interviews with four people involved in creating the documents.”

Ok, great so far and a truly shocking new dimension of possible Trump campaign collusion. So far so good. But then Haberman does this:

“The Trump campaign’s interest in the work began as Russians were escalating their effort to aid Donald J. Trump. Though the Israeli company’s pitches were narrower than Moscow’s interference campaign and appear unconnected, the documents show that a senior Trump aide saw the promise of a disruption effort to swing voters in Mr. Trump’s favor.”

Again, she shows she’s the opposite of a police or criminal investigator who wouldn’t assume right away it was unconnected no matter ‘appearances.’

This  ‘appearance’ of being disconnected is totally false.

Seth Abramson:

Scott Stedman:

Yes for some reason the Times only connects the dots to come up with the most uncharitable characterization as the headline when the subject is Hillary Clinton rathe rather than Donald Trump who gets the benefit of the doubt despite being the biggest liar  and most ethically challenged person in the world.

Now Franklin Foer whose experience at the end of the 2016 campaign is very relevant here. What triggered this memory for Foer is regarding the new New Yorker piece on Alfa Bank and the Trump campaign-another Trump-Russia story that got buried in late 2016-other than Louise Mensch, of course.

UPDATE: The Alfa Bank Dark Net at Noon – emptywheel

Was a server registered to the Trump Organization communicating with Russia’s Alfa Bank? (slate.com)

A journalist’s conscience leads her to reveal her source to the FBI. Here’s why. – The Washington Post

FN: Rather than simply dismiss Mensch out of hand I’d challenge skeptics to actually read this piece with benefit of two years of daily bombshells regarding Trump and his GOP co-conspirators and judge how much of it stood the test of time and how much of it was debunked. Rather than simply using the handwaving technique of saying ‘well she said X one time and that’s clearly absurd so let’s get back to reading Chris Cillizza and Maggie Haberman.’

It turns out Foer himself did write about it at the time and it had been roundly dismissed.

The Alfa Bank Dark Net at Noon – emptywheel

(Part of) What I Shared with the FBI – emptywheel

The New Yorker summarizes the story behind why strange ping action between Alfa Bank-one of Russia’s biggest banks and the Trump campaign became of significant interest:

“In June, 2016, after news broke that the Democratic National Committee had been hacked, a group of prominent computer scientists went on alert. Reports said that the infiltrators were probably Russian, which suggested to most members of the group that one of the country’s intelligence agencies had been involved. They speculated that if the Russians were hacking the Democrats they must be hacking the Republicans, too. “We thought there was no way in the world the Russians would just attack the Democrats,” one of the computer scientists, who asked to be identified only as Max, told me.”

They had though that it-but of course this turned out to be incorrect.

They did attack just the Democrats and when you discuss Russiagate you’re talking about literally a cyberattack on an American political party-the Democrats. But this group of prominent computer scientists looked to find similar attacks on the GOP-what they found instead was very curious ping action between Alfa and Trump Tower.

“As Max and his colleagues searched D.N.S. logs for domains associated with Republican candidates, they were perplexed by what they encountered. “We went looking for fingerprints similar to what was on the D.N.C. computers, but we didn’t find what we were looking for,” Max told me. “We found something totally different—something unique.” In the small town of Lititz, Pennsylvania, a domain linked to the Trump Organization (mail1.trump-email.com) seemed to be behaving in a peculiar way. The server that housed the domain belonged to a company called Listrak, which mostly helped deliver mass-marketing e-mails: blasts of messages advertising spa treatments, Las Vegas weekends, and other enticements. Some Trump Organization domains sent mass e-mail blasts, but the one that Max and his colleagues spotted appeared not to be sending anything. At the same time, though, a very small group of companies seemed to be trying to communicate with it.”

“Examining records for the Trump domain, Max’s group discovered D.N.S. lookups from a pair of servers owned by Alfa Bank, one of the largest banks in Russia. Alfa Bank’s computers were looking up the address of the Trump server nearly every day. There were dozens of lookups on some days and far fewer on others, but the total number was notable: between May and September, Alfa Bank looked up the Trump Organization’s domain more than two thousand times. “We were watching this happen in real time—it was like watching an airplane fly by,” Max said. “And we thought, Why the hell is a Russian bank communicating with a server that belongs to the Trump Organization, and at such a rate?”

“Only one other entity seemed to be reaching out to the Trump Organization’s domain with any frequency: Spectrum Health, of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Spectrum Health is closely linked to the DeVos family; Richard DeVos, Jr., is the chairman of the board, and one of its hospitals is named after his mother. His wife, Betsy DeVos, was appointed Secretary of Education by Donald Trump. Her brother, Erik Prince, is a Trump associate who has attracted the scrutiny of Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Trump’s ties to Russia. Mueller has been looking into Prince’s meeting, following the election, with a Russian official in the Seychelles, at which he reportedly discussed setting up a back channel between Trump and the Russian President, Vladimir Putin. (Prince maintains that the meeting was “incidental.”) In the summer of 2016, Max and the others weren’t aware of any of this. “We didn’t know who DeVos was,” Max said.

DeVos, is-as noted in the above paragraph-Erik Prince’s sister. According to Seth Abramson’s theory of the case, Erik Prince is one of the ten Trump campaign associates who were intimately involved in Russian collusion.

UPDATE: Seth Abramson on the Steele Dossier

(2) Seth Abramson on X: “72/ TRUE/UNKNOWN. Trump supporters made hay about—wait for it—Steele spelling “Alfa Bank” as “Alpha Bank,” which tells you how desperate they were to dispute a largely accurate doc. Steele nailed Aven’s closeness to Putin, advice on Trump, and Alfa Bank being broadly significant. https://t.co/bH4XEEoCeV” / X (twitter.com)

“The D.N.S. records raised vexing questions. Why was the Trump Organization’s domain, set up to send mass-marketing e-mails, conducting such meagre activity? And why were computers at Alfa Bank and Spectrum Health trying to reach a server that didn’t seem to be doing anything? After analyzing the data, Max said, “We decided this was a covert communication channel.”

“The Trump Organization, Alfa Bank, and Spectrum Health have repeatedly denied any contact. But the question of whether Max’s conclusion was correct remains enormously consequential. Was this evidence of an illicit connection between Russia and the Trump campaign? Or was it merely a coincidence, cyber trash, that fed suspicions in a dark time?”

Ok, now enter the NY Times’ Erick Litchau. He, of course, had a byline on the eventual infamous piece of ‘no clear ties to Russia.’ But it turns out this bad piece could have been so very different. If the subject had been Clinton rathe than Trump it would have been-I’m willing to bet anything you’d like on that one.

“In August, 2016, Max decided to reveal the data that he and his colleagues had assembled. “If the covert communications were real, this potential threat to our country needed to be known before the election,” he said. After some discussion, he and his lawyer decided to hand over the findings to Eric Lichtblau, of the Times. Lichtblau met with Max, and began to look at the data.”

So Max believed this information needed to be public before the election. And he reached out to Litchau a top NYT reporter. Of course, the cliff notes version is we know the punchline and Litchau didn’t inform the public-as he was prevented from doing so by Dean Baquet. His eventual piece did the opposite it asserted there was probably nothing going on between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Litchau ended up meeting the FBI itself-aka Trumpland.

“At the meeting, in late September, 2016, a roomful of officials told Lichtblau that they were looking into potential Russian interference in the election. According to a source who was briefed on the investigation, the Bureau had intelligence from informants suggesting a possible connection between the Trump Organization and Russian banks, but no data. The information from Max’s group could be a significant advance. “The F.B.I. was looking for people in the United States who were helping Russia to influence the election,” the source said. “It was very important to the Bureau. It was urgent.”

But ultimately  Dean Baquet buried the story.

FN: And though we’re getting ahead of ourselves again, so would the FBI.

“The F.B.I. officials asked Lichtblau to delay publishing his story, saying that releasing the news could jeopardize their investigation. As the story sat, Dean Baquet, the Times’ executive editor, decided that it would not suffice to report the existence of computer contacts without knowing their purpose. Lichtblau disagreed, arguing that his story contained important news: that the F.B.I. had opened a counterintelligence investigation into Russian contacts with Trump’s aides. “It was a really tense debate,” Baquet told me. “If I were the reporter, I would have wanted to run it, too. It felt like there was something there.” But, with the election looming, Baquet thought that he could not publish the story without being more confident in its conclusions.

This was a very strange decision-why do you need to know the purpose to report their existence?

Of course, it it were about Clinton Baquet would have run it-make what caveats are necessary-in paragraph 50. Nobody knew the ‘purpose’ of Clinton’s emails or what she said in her Wall Street speeches yet it was reported on and speculated on in great detail.

They couldn’t publish the story without being more confident in its conclusions. Note this is the opposite of the standard used on Clinton bashing stories-from Whitewater to Emailgate, to attacks on the Clinton Foundation. In those cases the allegation was enough and it was presumed that-in time-the worst speculations as to conclusions would be proven-or anyway, they’d be used in the piece’s headline.

FN: I really can’t for the life of me understand why you can’t mention the communications without knowing their purpose-the media publishes stories every day where you know the what but not the why. I mean figuring out the motivation is the job of Mueller-and the House Democrats!-not the press.

Indeed no one knew after the Comey Letter if there was anything incriminating in the alleged ‘new emails’ after Comey announced they may or may not be reopening Emailgate-but that sure didn’t stop Baquet and his Times in that case.

“Over time, the F.B.I.’s interest in the possibility of an Alfa Bank connection seemed to wane. An agency official told Lichtblau that there could be an innocuous explanation for the computer traffic.”

I just don’t understand this logic-that there could be a innocent explanation doesn’t mean there is-isn’t that what an investigation-or investigative journalism would look to find out? Why just assume there is? With Clinton’s server there also could have been an innocent explanation but the MSM and the GOP and HA Goodman all just assumed there wasn’t because they didn’t like Hillary Clinton-‘no one does.’

But since then we’ve learned a lot more about this entire episode. It turns out that the FBI agents who initiially received the information about the Alfa allegations had assumed there was an innocent explanation almost from the outset.

This was the recurring story of 2016-the FBI was willing to follow any potential lead against HRC to the ends of the earth-literally threatening to leak Huma’s emails to Wikileaks in October, 2016, but when the topic was potential investigations into Trump they just weren’t interested. Ironically it was thanks to Durham’s unpredicated boondoggle that we learned that the “rogue” agents over at the FBI pretty much dismissed the Alfa Bank story at the outset, dismissing it as “DNC oppo” because of an approaching Presidential debate. We would learn about this after Durham used this episode as a pretext to prosecute a Clinton lawyer.

Emptywheel-who else?-did a lot of great work chronicling the Durham Fiasco.

As it turns out it “Phil”-the source she decided to report to the FBI due to her suspicions of his role in Russian interference-actually shopped her the story on Alfa. She had turned down his offer and later  came to believe this was his angle-to put disinformation in the story to discredit her or anyone else who reported on it.

The Alfa Bank Dark Net at Noon – emptywheel

But as we will see in Chapter FBI FOIA this was the recurring theme for Trumpland the FBI in 2016-as they also tabled Christopher Steele’s Dossier-this was when he made the decision to publish his story with Mother Jones’ David Corn. And you wonder what they did with EW’s interview-we know what they did with the larger Alfa Bank story-tabled it for three years then weaponized it against Michael Sussman, et al. Here in early 2024, we’ve already learned that many over at Trumpland were apocalyptic over the FBI’s investigation into Trump’s stolen sensitive documents.

Then, on October 30th, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid wrote a letter to James Comey, the director of the F.B.I., charging that the Bureau was withholding information about “close ties and coordination” between the Trump campaign and Russia. “We had a window,” Lichtblau said. His story about Alfa Bank ran the next day. But it bore only a modest resemblance to what he had filed. The headline— “investigating donald trump, f.b.i. sees no clear link to russia”—seemed to exonerate the Trump campaign. And, though the article mentioned the server, it omitted any reference to the computer scientists who had told Lichtblau that the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank might have been communicating. “We were saying that the investigation was basically over—and it was just beginning,” Lichtblau told me.

FN: Again I didn’t go to journalism school but why in the world would you not include reference to the computer scientists? Baquet claimed that if you don’t know intent you can’t print a story-a novel and new premise never before practiced by anyone in journalism. So he was claiming there wasn’t enough information. But then in the actual piece he edits out important information that gives the story more context and makes it more fulsome. Indeed, by leaving out this important fact it makes it seem even more ‘speculative.’

Again, this Bacquet standard simply makes no sense-if you can’t report on any suspicious activity without in advance knowing the intent then there’d be few stories. On the other hand Bacquet and friends went wild on the emails again after the Comey letter even though they didn’t know if there was anything new and incriminating in this batch that very conveniently  was made public 11 days before the election-and of course it turns out there wasn’t anything.

Regarding intent I always ask cui bono? Who benefits? Clearly the rogue Trump agents who were running things and had just forced Comey’s hand on the Comey letter. They told Licthtau there’s nothing to Trump and Russia and that was all HE WROTE.

FN: That’s my strong belief based on a clear pattern at the Trumpland. If you think I’m wrong prove it-by all means corroborate what really happened. That’s the hope of this book that others will pursue all these very pregnant leads. Again, Comeygate and Trumpland are very important stories for an enterprising reporter who wants their own big scoop and wants to fish in less crowded waters.

UPDATE: Regarding this crucial question we are still waiting as the IG seems to have become little more than Trump’s political handmaiden-I’ll leave it to the MSM to come up with an innocuous and banal sounding reason the IG still hasn’t released its report on the rogue anti Clinton pro Trump FBI agents 33 months since it begun investigating it back in January, 2017 and yet has had time in the meantime to release a report on Andy McCabe, to report on the texts of Lisa Page and Peter Strozk, and do another full report on Comey-no charges but dirtying him up-kind of giving him his own medicine to be sure.

End of UPDATE

While Baquet quashed the Alfa Bank story, Franklin Foer-who the New Yorker piece also documents-published his own piece in Slate. The new piece in the New Yorker caused him to look back with some regret:

UPDATE: Apparently he deleted this tweet for some reason-hence the virtue of the screenshot…

“On October 31, 2016, just before the presidential election, I published a story in Slate that I thought hinted at a possible center of the scandal. My story was about a group of computer scientists who believed that they had uncovered technical evidence showing communication between a server linked to the Trump Organization and servers linked to Alfa-Bank in Moscow. The computer scientists were vexed. They weren’t even sure what exactly they’d found. But they were convinced that it was odd enough to deserve press attention and public scrutiny. I tried to be very clear about the limitations of the evidence—but I was also sure that even this limited evidence was a big deal. When I tweeted the link to the story, I blurted, with perhaps a touch too much swagger, that there was still time for an October surprise.”

“Nearly two years have passed since the publication of that piece—and there’s rarely a week when I don’t think about it.”

“This morning, The New Yorker published a story by Dexter Filkins, a reporter I admire, attempting to close the gaps in the server story. He produced a meticulous work of investigative journalism. But as I read his piece, it helped set in relief some of the lessons about reporting and about covering this scandal that I have carried from the fracas over my own server piece—and it triggered some intense and unpleasant memories. “

“My story in Slate went live in the late afternoon of Halloween. My family and friends had gathered in our dining room to eat pizza before embarking on trick-or-treating. As I emerged somewhat bleary from my basement office, I felt that swirl of exhilaration and anxiety that comes with publishing a piece on a subject sure to be controversial. And for a few hours, it felt like I had published something that would surely matter. My phone buzzed with requests to appear on television. Hillary Clinton tweeted my story, which ensured that nearly every political reporter (and lots of voters) saw my work. I set out with my kids down our street, although I never really removed my nose from my phone. Neighbors greeted me with high fives.”

“But as I was trailing our pack of costumed kids, I started to get the sense that the reception to my piece might not be as warm as I had hoped. Prime-time shows on MSNBC canceled my appearances. I got word that network lawyers didn’t want MSNBC to delve into questions about the server without harder evidence. Other computer scientists began to pick away at my reporting on Twitter, and then in lengthy blog posts. By the time I got home, The New York Times had published its now-notorious headline: “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia.” The Times, as is its style, didn’t mention my piece. But it cited FBI agents who dismissed the essence of it, writing, “The F.B.I. ultimately concluded that there could be an innocuous explanation, like a marketing email or spam, for the computer contacts.”

UPDATE: Again, as I touched on above, and will discuss in more detail in the FBI FOIA chapter, thanks to Durham’s baseless investigation into Michael Sussman we know-again Marcy Wheeler did a LOT of great work on this-that it was just a marketing email or spam was basically Trumpland the FBI  repeating Alfa Bank’s version of events word for word-the day after Sussman left the Alfa evidence.

End UPDATE

UPDATE 2.0:

Trump-Russia news: the past 48 hours in Mueller investigation news, explained – Vox

So Baquet on the one hand claimed not to have enough information-it didn’t just want to report on the case it wanted to first solve it. Yet on the other hand he held back a lot of pertinent information. Ok, the more innocent explanation-not that innocent in its own right but more so than the alliterative-is Times is being the Times in refusing to mention a rival. But the problem is they held back information that was relevant for the reader to understand the story.

It’s amazing-and remember this when the GOP talks about the liberal media. As the Times and the rest of the MSM amplified the fake email story to a category 11, everything was done to bury the Alfa Bank piece. With difference editorial decisions by the media over the last 11 days post Comey’s letter it would have been a different outcome.

FN: Imagine if Russia rather than Comey’s speculations about what might or might not be in these ‘new’ emails had been the topic of conversation-Clinton would have won in a landslide.

“For a journalist, the fear of getting it wrong is a mortal one. Experts loudly calling me wrongheaded were hard to shake. Many of their objections were highly technical—and I would never pass myself off as someone with an expert’s grasp of computer science. (Less than 24 hours after my piece went live, The Intercept published a very long, very detailed piece that suggested my piece was likely bunk.) I began to wonder if I had missed something or had been suckered. Still, when I called the experts I had consulted for the piece, as well as other sources I had relied on, none of them backed down. I published a piece that conceded that more innocuous explanations of the evidence were possible. I hoped to convey a greater sense of humility about what the evidence suggested, without walking back my reporting. None of it felt good.”

Yes-Glenn Greenwald’s Intercept. During the general, the allegedly ‘leftist’ Greenwald had 16 negative posts on Clinton and/or the Democrats and 0 on Trump and/or the GOP. When I pointed this fact out to him in 2017 he blocked me. He mocked the Alfa Bank story at the time. As Foer documents, much of the opposition to the story came not just from Trump defenders but from the Left who didn’t want to give ‘that woman’ a glide path to victory. “

“The week before the election was a strange time. Rather than focusing on the impending horrors of a potential Trump administration, much of the world was pondering a Hillary Clinton presidency. I’m pretty sure that this sense of electoral inevitability informed the reception to my piece. Many of the loudest critics of the piece were journalists on the left who didn’t care for Clinton’s hawkish position on Russia. They didn’t want Clinton to drift into office, full of hatred toward the Russians, amping up tensions on the basis of what they considered thin evidence.”

Note that this attitude of the Greenwald Left was not based on the facts of the story but simply because they didn’t want her to win the election.

The rest is history-we now have minority rule enthroned at every level of government-the WH, ,Congress, and the Supreme Court. Above we noted that the Times did apologize for its very poor reporting in 2017. But Dean Baquet didn’t like that at all-as he fired her over the piece.

A week after the Times story appeared, Trump won the election. On Inauguration Day, Liz Spayd, the Times’ ombudsman, published a column criticizing the paper’s handling of stories related to Trump and Russia, including the Alfa Bank connection. “The Times was too timid in its decisions not to publish the material it had,” she wrote. Spayd’s article did not sit well with Baquet. “It was a bad column,” he told the Washington Post. Spayd argued that Slate had acted correctly by publishing a more aggressive story, which Baquet dismissed as a “fairly ridiculous conclusion.” That June, Spayd’s job was eliminated, as the paper’s publisher said that the position of ombudsman had become outdated in the digital age. When I talked to Baquet recently, he still felt that he had been right to resist discussing the server in greater depth, but he acknowledged that the Times had been too quick to disclaim the possibility of Trump’s connections to Russia. “The story was written too knowingly,” he said. “The headline was flawed. We didn’t know then what we know now.”

But that’s the trouble-Baquet still acts like you have to know the conclusion before you start to write the book.

Overall Baquet seems just not to like the Alfa story or any story about it as he also knocked Foer’s piece:

“But in this instance, the paper decided to broadly dismiss the Alfa-Bank story, even when its own star reporter had such strong belief in it and when it had evidence that (at the very least) complicated the FBI’s assessment. And what felt unseemly is that the paper’s executive editor publicly bickered with the Times ombudsman who criticized the paper as “too timid in its decisions not to publish the material it had.” It also stung that he trashed my story after the fact. “That is not journalism. It is typing,” Dean Baquet told The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple, responding to critics the day after the Trump inauguration.

Good to see the Times still  hasn’t learned a thing.

P.S. While-she’s been knocked a lot by MSM journalists, Louise Mensch also had an early piece on Alfa Bank. 

OK you can criticize her any way you choose but at the end of the day she got there, Franklin Foer-seen by the MSM as having much more credibility got there-Dean Baquet still isn’t there, never will get there, tries to have it both ways-he admits the larger point that the Trump has no ties to Russia headline was wrong yet still dismisses the story that showed it was wrong as not journalism just typing. 

UPDATE: While much of the MSM has been very slow to learn the lessons of 2016 none have been more defiant and obstinate than Baquet who continues to double and triple down to this day-the latest being an attempt by NYT reporter Ken Vogel to insist that no matter how outrageous Trump’s actions in trying to extort Ukraine into prosecuting Biden’s son, still Trump raises a legitimate point on the underlying accusations against Hunter Biden. In reality there is no there there. 

License

October 28, 2016: a Day That Will Live in Infamy Copyright © by . All Rights Reserved.

Share This Book