Tag Archives: Mollie Hemingway

More Spin

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Mollie Hemingway posted an article at The Federalist today that illustrates how the media manipulates information in order to fit a pre-planned narrative.

The article reports:

Adam Goldman broke, and cushioned, the news that former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith was to plead guilty to fabricating evidence in a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant application to spy on Trump campaign affiliate Carter Page.

His job was to present the news as something other than an indictment of the FBI’s handling of the Russia collusion hoax, to signal to other media that they should move on from the story as quickly as possible, and to hide his own newspaper’s multi-year participation in the Russia collusion hoax. One intelligence source described it as an “insult” to his intelligence and “beyond Pravda,” a reference to the official newspaper of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. Here’s how Goldman did it.

The New York Times used to put every Russia collusion story it had on the front page. Then, when the narrative fell apart, the Times moved on to a new narrative of redefining America as irredeemably racist.

Even though Clinesmith’s guilty plea is directly relevant to the false story the Times peddled for years, and even though it broke the news of his guilty plea, the publication hid the story deep in the paper and put a boring headline on it. “Ex-F.B.I. Lawyer Expected to Plead Guilty in Durham Investigation,” as if begging readers to move on. If they didn’t, the subhead told them that the news really wasn’t such a big deal. “Prosecutors are not expected to reveal any evidence of a broad anti-Trump conspiracy among law enforcement officials,” it claimed, without, well, evidence.

In fact, while the charging document was brief, it revealed that while Clinesmith deliberately fabricated evidence in the fourth warrant to spy on Page, all four warrants failed to mention the information the CIA gave the FBI months before the first warrant was filed. That information was that Page, a former Marine officer who graduated from the Naval Academy, had been a source for the agency, sharing information about Russians the agency was interested in. In fact, he’d done it for five years.

The article notes:

Goldman claims, without evidence, that Trump “has long been blunt about seeing the continuing investigation by the prosecutor examining the earlier inquiry, John H. Durham, as political payback.” In fact, Trump has said that no president should go through what he went through: the weaponization of a political opponent’s conspiracy theory to undermine a duly elected president.

Is it payback when you are trying to find the truth and prevent future wrongdoing?

The article concludes:

Had the FBI been properly informed that Steele was working both for the Clinton-funded operation and the Russian oligarch, they said they would have been much more sensitive to the possibility his entire operation was related to Russian disinformation. Also, Steele’s two most explosive claims — about Michael Cohen being in Prague and the “pee tape” claim — were both thought to have been part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

The dossier was key to securing the wiretap on Page, which Goldman doesn’t mention. He instead writes, “Investigators eventually suspected that Russian spies had marked Mr. Page for recruitment” as the reason they were able to get a wiretap.

All of which to say, in a story about malfeasance on Carter Page’s FISA warrants, Goldman doesn’t mention the dossier until the penultimate paragraph of a 30-paragraph story.

These are just a few of the ways Goldman manipulates the story to protect the Russia collusion hoax he participated in. Because they were co-conspirators in the hoax, too many in the corporate media are serving as obstacles to holding the FBI and other powerful government agencies accountable for their actions.

Be prepared for much more silly-season spin.

How The Russia Hoax Unraveled

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John Solomon posted an article at Just The News today that details some of the research he has done over the last three years and also lists the twelve revelations that destroyed the carefully-crafted narrative that President Trump was colluding with the Russians.

This is the list. Please follow the link to the article for details and the sources:

1. Flynn’s RT visit with Putin wasn’t nefarious.

2.  (Flynn was) Not a Russian agent.

3. Case closed memo.

4. DOJ heartburn.

5. Logan Act threat wasn’t real.

6. Unequal treatment.

7. Disguising a required warning.

8. “Playing games.“

9. No deception.

10. No actual denial.

11.) Interview Reports Edited.

12.) Evidence withheld.

The article also notes how John Solomon’s investigation began:

Shortly after my colleague Sara Carter and I began reporting in 2017 on the possibility that the FBI was abusing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to spy on Americans during the Russia investigation, I received a call. It was an intermediary for someone high up in the intelligence community.

The story that source told me that day — initially I feared it may have been too spectacular to be true — was that FBI line agents had actually cleared former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn of any wrongdoing with Russia only to have the bureau’s leadership hijack the process to build a case that he lied during a subsequent interview.

In fact, my notes show, the source used the words “concoct a 1001 false statements case” to describe the objections of career agents who did not believe Flynn had intended to deceive the FBI. A leak of a transcript of Flynn’s call with the Russian ambassador was just part of a campaign, the source alleged.

The tip resulted in a two-and-a-half-year journey by myself and a small group of curious and determined journalists like Carter, Catherine Herridge, Greg Jarrett, Mollie Hemingway, Lee Smith, Byron York, and Kimberly Strassel to slowly peel back the onion.

The pursuit of the truth ended Thursday when the Justice Department formally asked a court to vacate Flynn’s conviction and end the criminal case, acknowledging the former general had indeed been cleared by FBI agents and that the bureau did not have a lawful purpose when it interviewed him in January 2017.

Attorney General William Barr put it more bluntly in an interview Thursday: “They kept it open for the express purpose of trying to catch, to lay a perjury trap for General Flynn.”

To understand just how dramatic a turnaround Thursday’s action was, one has to go back to the headlines of 2017 fanned by the likes of The Washington Post, The New York Times, MSNBC, CNN and others and told by a host of former Obama administration officials and their Democratic allies in Congress.

Flynn was suspected of violating the Logan Act by talking with the Russian ambassador. He may have been compromised by a 2015 visit with Vladimir Putin at a Russia Today event. He lied to the FBI. He may have been an agent of Russia and involved in colluding to hijack the election. He betrayed his country.

All of that was alleged, it turns out, without proof. And then Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team pressured Flynn to plead guilty to falsely telling FBI agents that he did not discuss sanctions with Russia’s ambassador. It turns out that wasn’t true either.

Thank God for the honest reporters who were willing to pursue this story. They were a necessary part of finding out the truth.

Reaping What You Have Sown

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Mollie Hemingway posted an article at The Federalist today about the charges against  former Vice-President Joe Biden.

The article reminds us of some of the details of the charges against Brett Kavanaugh:

…the Washington Post carefully packaged and presented Christine Blasey Ford’s claim that Kavanaugh had tried to rape her when she was in high school. The media and Democrats immediately latched onto the accusation in a desperate attempt to keep Kavanaugh from being confirmed.

It wasn’t the quality of the allegation that led to this reaction. Blasey Ford had no evidence she had ever met Kavanaugh, much less that he had tried to rape her. She wasn’t sure about any detail related to the event other than that she had precisely one beer and that Kavanaugh had tried to rape her.

She didn’t know how she got to the alleged event, where it was, how she got home, or whose house it was. None of the four witnesses she identified to reporters as having been at the event in question supported her claim. That included her close friend Leland Keyser, who was pressured by mutual acquaintances to change her testimony that she had no recollection of the event in question. Kavanaugh had an army of close friends and supporters who testified to his character throughout his adolescence and adulthood.

Justice Kavanaugh’s remarks at the time were a foreshadowing of what is happening now:

I understand the passions of the moment, but I would say to those senators, your words have meaning. Millions of Americans listen carefully to you. Given comments like those, is it any surprise that people have been willing to do anything to make any physical threat against my family, to send any violent e-mail to my wife, to make any kind of allegation against me and against my friends. To blow me up and take me down.

You sowed the wind. For decades to come, I fear that the whole country will reap the whirlwind.

We are currently reaping that whirlwind. Time will tell whether or not the charges against Joe Biden are true, but we have opened up a Pandora’s Box in politics that was better left closed.

 

An Interesting Question

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The Federalist posted an article today that asks an interesting question–“If Bloomberg Couldn’t Buy 2020, How Could Russia Buy 2016?”

The article quotes The Federalist Senior Editor Mollie Hemingway:

“We had years where people were saying a couple hundred thousand dollars in barely literate Facebook ads from Russians caused Donald Trump to win. Here you had a guy spend nearly $1 billion and he went nowhere. It’s a humiliating defeat for Michael Bloomberg,” she said.

Host Bret Baier drilled the point home: “So Russians influenced the election with $200,000, or $300,000 in Facebook ads? And Mike Bloomberg couldn’t get more than 50 delegates with $600 million dollars?”

“And this hurts Bernie Sanders’s message, too, because he likes to say the billionaires control everything,” Hemingway said. “Clearly Bloomberg having all this money didn’t do as much for him as Biden having the media and the establishment behind him. I would pick media and establishment over millions all day.”

If money could buy elections, we would have either President Jeb Bush or President Hillary Clinton. American voters do respond to ads, but they also have common sense.

I Suspect That This Is Not The First Time This Has Been Done

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On Thursday The Federalist posted an article about The New York Times best seller list. It seems that the list is not as straight forward as it should be.

The article reports:

The New York Times fudged book sales data in order to deny top-five billing to the best-selling “Justice on Trial,” the definitive and deeply reported account of the nomination and confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, which was written by Carrie Severino and Mollie Hemingway, a Senior Editor for The Federalist. Industry sales figures show that the New York Times ignored actual data on nationwide sales in order to depress the rankings not just for the Hemingway/Severino book, but also Mark Levin’s latest book on the corruption of modern journalism.

According to Publisher’s Weekly, the only public source of point-of-sale data on book sales, “Justice on Trial,” was the top-selling non-fiction book published over the last week. Tara Westover’s blockbuster memoir “Educated” was the top-selling non-fiction overall according to data from NPD Bookscan, but is excluded from Publisher’s Weekly’s list since it was first published over a year ago.

Mark Levin’s “Unfreedom of the Press” came in at #2 on the best-selling list, followed by David McCullough’s “The Pioneers” at #3, “Three Women” by Lisa Taddeo at #4, and Michelle Obama’s “Becoming” at #5. Hemingway’s and Severino’s book outsold each of those books placed ahead of it on the New York Times list, according to nationwide sales data.

Amazon.com, the online retail giant, reported that “Justice on Trial” was also the top-selling non-fiction book on its site last week. It was Amazon’s top-selling book overall, non-fiction or otherwise, from Monday through Friday of last week.

The New York Times, however, reported a very different ranking at complete odds with the Publisher’s Weekly/NPD Bookscan sales figures. Instead of accurately reporting that “Justice on Trial” was the second best-selling hardcover non-fiction book in America last week according to widely accepted industry sales data, the New York Times put the book at #6 on its list, behind Mark Levin’s book at #5. Neither ranking can be justified by actual sales figures.

The article concludes:

Rather than collecting nationwide data on book sales across all platforms and locations, the New York Times reportedly surveys only select retailers, the identities of which the paper refuses to disclose.

In a 2007 column, former public editor Clark Hoyt all but admitted that the New York Times Best Seller list was fake news.

The list “is not a completely accurate barometer of what the reading public is buying,” Hoyt wrote. “For my money, if the main list is a best sellers list, it ought to reflect what’s selling best.”

So I guess The New York Times best seller list is about as accurate as the rest of their reporting.

 

Repeating A Failed Strategy

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I vaguely remember the Anita Hill hearings. I do remember wondering at the time why Anita Hill would follow a man who was sexually harassing her from job to job. Why didn’t she just say good riddance and stay in the job she had instead of moving on to the next job working with him? If the harassment was real, I seriously doubt she would have followed him. At any rate, there are some interesting similarities between the attempted destruction of Clarence Thomas and the attempted destruction of Brett Kavanaugh.There is also some revising of comments made during the Anita Hill testimony being done.

Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist posted an article yesterday citing some of the revised history now being spouted.

The article at The Federalist notes:

“Not only didn’t I vote for Clarence Thomas, I believed her from the beginning. I was against Clarence Thomas, I did everything in my power to defeat Clarence Thomas and he won by the smallest margin anyone ever won going on the Supreme Court,” Biden told “The View’s” Joy Behar.

That is the current statement.

The article notes past statements:

But in 1998, Biden admitted to Specter (Senator Arlen Specter ) that “It was clear to me from the way she was answering the questions, [Hill] was lying” about a key part of her testimony. The exchange was published in Specter’s 2000 memoir, “Passion for Truth: From Finding JFK’s Single Bullet to Questioning Anita Hill to Impeaching Clinton.”

The issue is important, as the media and other partisans rewrite the historical record about Hill and her accusations. The widely watched hearings revealed inaccuracies in Hill’s various versions of events and ended with 58 percent of Americans believing Thomas and only 24 percent believing Hill. There was no gap between the sexes in the results. In the intervening years, activists have relentlessly attempted to change the narrative, writing fan fiction about Hill, bestowing honors on her, and asserting that her disputed allegations were credible.

The article also notes:

Finally he asked Hill about a USA Today article that claimed, “Anita Hill was told by Senate staffers her signed affidavit alleging sexual harassment by Clarence Thomas would be the instrument that ‘quietly and behind the scenes’ would force him to withdraw his name.”

Specter read from the article: “Keith Henderson, a 10-year friend of Hill and former Senate Judiciary Committee staffer, says Hill was advised by Senate staffers that her charge would be kept secret and her name kept from public scrutiny.” Later it said, “They would approach Judge Thomas with the information and he would withdraw and not turn this into a big story, Henderson says.”

Specter asked her if this was true, attempting to find out what Senate Democrats had arranged with Hill. Nine times she denied the claim, demurred, or otherwise attempted to get away from the question. She said she could vividly remember events related to Thomas from many years prior, but couldn’t quite remember this conversation from weeks prior.

Somehow this all seems too familiar. I am grateful for men who do not back down when faced with accusations that have no evidence and no collaboration. If women are serious about ending the sexual harassment of women, they also need to be serious about ending false accusations against men whose politics they may disagree with.

 

A Troubling Story

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Mollie Hemingway posted an article at The Federalist today explaining why she didn’t believe the Trump-Russia collusion story. It is a compelling analysis of how events unfolded. I strongly suggest that you follow the link above and read the entire article.

The article includes a quote from the book Shattered by Jonathan Allen (a book about the 2016 Clinton campaign):

In other calls with advisers and political surrogates in the days after the election, Hillary declined to take responsibility for her own loss. ‘She’s not being particularly self-reflective,’ said one longtime ally who was on calls with her shortly after the election. Instead, Hillary kept pointing her finger at Comey and Russia. ‘She wants to make sure all these narratives get spun the right way,’ this person said.

That strategy had been set within twenty-four hours of her concession speech. Mook and Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.

In Brooklyn, her team coalesced around the idea that Russian hacking was the major unreported story of the campaign, overshadowed by the contents of stolen e-mails and Hillary’s own private-server imbroglio.

It seems as if the Russia conspiracy theory was the result of refusing to accept responsibility for losing an election and simply became the basis of an attempt to unseat an elected President.

The article concludes:

I didn’t fall for the Russia hoax that CNN and other media outlets did because I worked hard at understanding the appeal of his candidacy even before the Russia narrative started. At the same time, I recognized how disruptive he was to the established order and the livelihoods of those who had grown comfortable in D.C. Unlike many reporters, I knew and loved many people who voted for Trump. My background as a media critic made me aware of information campaigns and how to resist them. My dislike of the interventionist foreign policy made me less susceptible to scaremongering about realist foreign policy.

Also, I believed intelligence agencies when they claimed they would selectively leak against Trump as retaliation for his criticism of them, and knew to be skeptical of anonymous leaks. It helped that someone inadvertently revealed some information to me about the source of the information CNN had been given.

It wasn’t just about not falling for the fake conspiracy theory. If Trump was not what all the media outlets long suggested he was — a traitor who was conspiring with Russia — that meant that he was the victim of an information operation that was being funneled through the highest powers of the federal government.

Because a few of us weren’t so foolish to fall for the first theory, we were able to look at the leak operation that gullible media outlets were engaged in with a more critical eye.

The lady has amazing insight.