A Massive Media Scandal

As the Democrats' impeachment sham drones on with an expected vote to impeach Trump today, the real news in Washington is about the Crossfire Hurricane scandal. The Dems would prefer to maintain focus on their despicable attempt to impeach a president for a telephone conversation that resulted in NOTHING—no actions of any kind. They need to deflect from the simple fact that the FBI and intelligence agencies under a Democratic administration used knowingly false information, subverted the FISA process in significant ways, and spied on the Democrat's opponent to provide them with an advantage. Now that's election interference!

But there's a collateral story that is equally important—the complete and utter failure of legacy media to report the scandal. In fact, the Dem's trained hamsters in the media did everything possible to cover it up.

Glen Greenwald comments:

If you don’t consider FBI lying, concealment of evidence, and manipulation of documents in order to spy on a U.S. citizen in the middle of a presidential campaign to be a major scandal, what is? But none of this is aberrational: the FBI still has its headquarters in a building named after J. Edgar Hoover – who constantly blackmailed elected officials with dossiers and tried to blackmail Martin Luther King into killing himself – because that’s what these security state agencies are. They are out-of-control, virtually unlimited police state factions that lie, abuse their spying and law enforcement powers, and subvert democracy and civic and political freedoms as a matter of course.

In this case, no rational person should allow standard partisan bickering to distort or hide this severe FBI corruption. The IG Report leaves no doubt about it. It’s brimming with proof of FBI subterfuge and deceit, all in service of persuading a FISA court of something that was not true: that U.S. citizen and former Trump campaign official Carter Page was an agent of the Russian government and therefore needed to have his communications surveilled.

Just a few excerpts from the report should suffice to end any debate for rational persons about how damning it is. The focus of the first part of the IG Report was on the warrants obtained by the DOJ, at the behest of the FBI, to spy on Carter Page on the grounds that there was probable cause to believe he was an agent of the Russian government. That Page was a Kremlin agent was a widely disseminated media claim – typically asserted as fact even though it had no evidence. As a result of this media narrative, the Mueller investigation examined these widespread accusations yet concluded that “the investigation did not establish that Page coordinated with the Russian government in its efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.”

Those of us who followed Crossfire Hurricane from the beginning were chagrined but not surprised that the media covered it up, claiming it was "conspiracy theory" or a hoax. And #NeverTrumpers like Chris Wallace want to know why Donald Trump castigates the media at every opportunity. This scandal is yet another indication that the media's dishonesty and bias gives Trump ample opportunity and justification to do so.

Greenwald summarizes:

... the revelations of the IG Report are not merely a massive FBI scandal. They are also a massive media scandal, because they reveal that so much of what the U.S. media has authoritatively claimed about all of these matters for more than two years is completely false.

But who is going to report the media scandal? Certainly not the trained hamsters, and not Chris Wallace. I guess honest reporting is left to the a few true journalists (Kim Strassel and Mollie Hemingway come to mind) and the 'little people' on small news sites, blogs, and with tweets, who have been doggedly following this story, reporting it accurately, and sounding the alarm for over two years.