Americans outside the narrow confines of the media aristocracy find the Stalinist show trial neither urgent nor important.

 

Dickerson is a thoughtful broadcaster. His words are certainly more reasonable than what some of his peers were pushing. Matthew Dowd, who until recently was ABC News’ chief political analyst, repeatedly compared people concerned about inflation to Nazis. But on this day, Dickerson’s analysis suffered from myriad problems.

...

The only reason the establishment is pretending to view the Democrat-appointed January 6 committee as legitimate, much less important, is to cover up what a mess the 2020 election was and to get their nemesis out of politics. That’s why Americans outside the narrow confines of the media aristocracy find the Stalinist show trial neither urgent nor important. And they wish that leaders of the country would truly get working on things that are both.

Great summary of Russia-Gate by Mollie Hemingway

Accurate, concise statement of what happened...https://t.co/XrrMCvJ4PQ

— Byron York (@ByronYork) August 15, 2020

Media Silent As Christopher Steele ‘Hero’ ‘Spymaster’ Narrative Crumbles

Mollie Heming way names names. 

 The media liars who peddled the Russia hoax. 

 Read the whole thing. 

 For years, the media assured Americans that the dossier alleging treasonous collusion between Donald Trump and Russia was based on the scrupulous work of a mastermind British ex-spy and his vast network of credible and well-connected sources spread throughout Europe. 

It wasn’t true. Steele did not personally collect any of the factual information in his reports. 

The “vast network” was instead a “social circle” of an American-based former Brookings Institute junior staffer, recently identified for the first time as Igor Danchenko. 

The friends didn’t have well-documented claims so much as rumors, drunken gossip, and outright brainstorming, conjecture, and speculation. 

Even that information was “multiple layers of hearsay upon hearsay” before it got to Steele, who then hyperbolically overstated it. 

And the damning claims of “collusion” appear to have been scandalously misattributed or invented out of whole cloth. 

With such shoddy information collection and analysis methods, there was never any reason to give credence to any of the salacious allegations in the dossier, whether it was claims of secret deals with Russian oil concerns, secret meetings in foreign capitals, prostitutes urinating on Moscow hotel room beds, files of compromising information, or the careful cultivation of Trump, yes Trump, into the most effective Russian agent in history. 

Here are the 21 primary liars that participated in a treasonous coup attempt to overthrow an elected American President.

1.  Adam Goldman 
2.  David Corn 
3. Michael Horowitz 
4.  Michael Isikoff 
5.  Evan Perez 
6. Jim Sciutto 
7. Jake Tapper 
8. Carl Bernstein 
9. Michele Neubert 
10. Ken Dilanian 
11. Cassandra Vinograd 
12. Tracy Connor 
13. Bradley Hope 
14. Michael Rothfeld
15.  Alan Cullison 
16. Scott Shane 
17. Matthew Rosenberg 
18. Luke Harding 
19. Jane Mayer 
20. Natasha Bertrand 
21. Christian Caryl

Molly Hemingway: "Media Conspiracy Theories About Devin Nunes Are Getting Out Of Control"

The only way the country knows that the Russia conspiracy theory was a Clinton campaign operation that was weaponized and subsidized by the country’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies is thanks to congressional oversight. Two committees in particular have done actual work to uncover facts in the face of media misinformation: The Senate Judiciary Committee chaired by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.). Nunes has taken most of the heat for doing congressional oversight rather than congressional complacency.

...

It is worth noting that Nunes’ and others’ work doing real congressional oversight has deeply embarassed the media. Without congressional oversight, the country would not know:

• That Clinton and the DNC secretly funded Fusion GPS’s dossier.
• That Trump affiliates were wiretapped during the campaign.
• That a $50 million public relations operation is ongoing to feed Russia stories to the media and government even now.
• That the FBI is working with this group running the PR operation.
• That Bruce Ohr’s wife worked for Fusion GPS.
• That top officials were leaking to CNN.
• That the unverified dossier was used to justify FISA warrant applications.
• That no official intelligence was used in Peter Strzok’s electronic communication launching the investigation.

And much, much more. Yes, Nunes makes the media’s role in this story look just terrible. Still, their derangement toward him is getting ridiculous.

Mollie Hemingway @ The Federalist: "Media Gaslighting Can’t Hide Fact Trump Campaign Was Spied On"

Gaslighting is a tactic in which a person or entity, in order to gain more power, makes a victim question their reality. Since we get so much of our information about the world from the media, their twisting of the truth is very effective.

As the media "reports" on President Trump you begin to wonder about what is real and what is fake. Especially if you don't recall past reporting. For example, the media has been reporting both that the FBI has been spying on the Trump campaign and denying that the Trump campaign has been spied on. That's gaslighting.

On Saturday night, heavily redacted copies of the FBI’s application to wiretap Trump campaign affiliate Carter Page were released. The portion of the 412-page document that was not redacted supported the claims of Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), as well as those made by the majority of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence....

President Trump tweeted triumphantly and hyperbolically about what the documents showed regarding the FBI’s behavior toward his campaign. Whatever you think about Trump’s reaction to the release of the FISA application, the media reaction to the story was disingenuous and even more hyperbolic than the president’s tweets. After a year of continuous and alarming revelations, the media are still more interested in proving the Trump campaign treasonously colluded with Russia than wrestling with the fact that the FBI spied on a presidential campaign, and used dubious partisan political research to justify their surveillance.

The media reaction to both the redacted Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) wiretap applications and President Trump’s tweets was pure gaslighting. They claimed the FISA applications hurt the critics’ case. It wasn’t that they reported the news that critics of the FISA application felt vindicated while defenders of the wiretap applications also felt vindicated. They wrote as partisans in a war with those skeptical of FISA abuse....

This is part of a pattern for the media when they encounter facts related to the surveillance of the Trump campaign. When Department of Justice officials leaked to the media that they had run at least one informant against the Trump campaign, a breathtaking admission by any sense of news judgment, the news was buried in the middle of the story and completely downplayed.

Others joined in with the gaslighting, spending weeks arguing — and I’m not joking here — that running a secret government informant against a campaign is not spying on a campaign....

If you go back to last year, CNN’s Jake Tapper mocked and derided Republican voters who told pollsters they thought the Obama administration had spied on the Trump campaign. This mockery took place after CNN reported that … the Obama administration had spied on Page!...

You can, along with the partisan and gaslighting media, claim it’s not a big deal to run human informants or secretly gather intelligence against a presidential campaign. But you can not deny it happened.

Read the whole thing.  Mollie Hemingway at the Federalist has done a remarkable job of covering this story.