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Wednesday, July 25, 2018

Daniel Greenfield: ALL THE PRESIDENT’S HACKS: MEDIA FAKE NEWS FUELED OBAMA’S WATERGATE

When Hillary Clinton cites the “intelligence community assessment” to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the presidential election, she’s really repeating her own lie, that her campaign created, rolled through the media and the government, which used it to spy on the Trump campaign, and then finally became an “assessment” under orders from Obama carried out by political allies like Clapper and Brennan.

The media, which once boasted of exposing Watergate, had played a key role in Obama’s Watergate.

The release of a redacted FISA warrant application exposes the fact that the spying on Carter Page, a figure associated with the Trump campaign, relied on no sources other than Democrats and media allies.

In 2016, an arm of the Clinton campaign began assembling a dossier claiming that the Trump campaign was seeking damaging information about it from the Russians. The dossier actually represented an effort by the Clinton campaign to seek damaging information from the Russians about the Trump campaign.

The man tasked with that job, a former British intelligence agent named Christopher Steele, then went on to accuse figures involved with the Trump campaign, of doing the very thing he had been hired to do.

One of those men was Carter Page.

The Steele dossier claimed that Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was using Carter Page as an intermediary to work with the Russians against Hillary Clinton. But it was Steele who had actually been hired by the Clinton campaign to get information from the Russians to use against Donald Trump.

The FISA application to eavesdrop on Page is based on Steele’s work and the media echo chamber created around it. The intelligence assessment, which former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper admitted had been carried out under Obama’s orders, has the same tainted origins.

A Democrat smear was used by a Democrat administration to undermine a Republican’s victory.

The FISA application bets everything on Steele, while trying to hedge its bets by citing news stories, because Steele’s allegations against Page are as much of a dog’s breakfast as the rest of the dossier.

The entire excuse for spying on Carter Page and the Trump campaign were reports in the media based on a Clinton/DNC opposition research report that was never verified to this day.

The application mentions that "there has been speculation in the U.S. media that the Russian Government" was behind the DNC hack. Media allegations and speculations fill the application. First Amendment protections made the media very useful cutouts for the Clinton campaign.

The unredacted FISA application was based entirely on the work of Democrats and their media allies.

Fusion GPS, the organization used to hire Steele, used its contacts in the media and the government to seed the dossier. Then the dossier and the news stories based on it were used in the FISA application. Its claims about Steele’s Russian trip in 2016 are based on the unverified Steele dossier. ...
Instead of providing a second intelligence source, they offered a news story anonymously citing an intelligence source providing information to intelligence officials. But they were the intelligence officials....

The media has made Watergate into an essential part of its brand. Generations of reporters have come of age at journalism schools pretending to be Woodward and Bernstein. Not only did the media fail to expose Obama’s Watergate, but it was a key part of the infrastructure for spying on Republicans.

The FISA application reveals that domestic surveillance of Republicans would not have been possible without the media. In 2016, the media had become an official part of ‘All the President’s Men’. The reporters had become the plumbers of a political police state. Their smears were used to eavesdrop on political opponents and cast doubt on the outcome of a free and open election.

The media claims that it safeguards democracy. The FISA application shows it’s a threat to democracy.


Read the whole thing.

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