More Spin

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.