A good write up on thedossier, fake news, and one item that may soon be very important
This is potentially big:
"In August, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats announced the formation of a counterintelligence unit inside the FBI that was going to get to the bottom of national-security leaks. They were looking not just at the intelligence community but also Congress. Which is where the biggest of last week’s botched CNN stories gets even more interesting.
The email that CNN reported was part of the investigative evidence shared with the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by Republican Devin Nunes, with ranking Democratic member Adam Schiff. So a member of the committee or staffer is the likely source of the CNN leak-and it probably was not a Republican. If the mistaken date was on a document that was leaked to CNN and was part of a government sting operation-which sought to identify the leaker by altering a date on a document, and providing that document to only one member of the oversight committee-then whoever leaked that document has now been outed, and is facing some real trouble."
It would be nice to FINALLY see a Democrat going to jail for these illegal antics.
Now to the dossier and how so much of this makes no sense...
"Steele claims that two of his sources are Russian officials, including an intelligence officer. The bulk of the case for collusion rests on their information because they would be best placed to have the skinny on the Trump team’s dealings with the Kremlin. And who knows? Maybe Russian spooks really do give up secrets to anyone who asks, even a former British spy who asks long-distance questions of Russian officials through paid intermediaries.
But why on earth should we believe them? Isn’t the premise of Russiagate that Trump is bad precisely because he colluded with Russian officials? So Russian officials are conniving bastards when they seek to secretly undermine an American election by conspiring with Trump-but when they conspire with an ex-British spy to claim that Trump is conspiring with Russian officials they’re 100 percent trustworthy? Is your head spinning yet? Mine is.
Yes, the Steele dossier is nonsense. Before the election, Fusion GPS met with the executive editor of The New York Times, Dean Baquet, who passed on the biggest story on the planet. As Baquet wrote to Axios in an email: “I can say without hesitation that we were never told anything reportable about Russia that we held back at any point.” In other words: Nothing in the Steele dossier was fit to print.
Did Baquet blow a New York Times exclusive on maybe the biggest story of all time? Did Reuters blow it, too? Did all the other news organizations that threw the Steele dossier in the trash in the fall of 2016 also get the story wrong? That would certainly be news. But I don’t think it happened."
"When Barack Obama’s four intelligence chiefs briefed the newly elected president on the Steele dossier weeks before the inauguration, they re-credentialed the dossier for the press. The dossier that respectable editors-nearly all of them-had rejected in the fall was suddenly news. Why? Because now the story was about senior American spies briefing the newly elected president about a report that no respectable press outfit could verify. So now it was OK to publish it. No, wait, it was a vital public service to publish it. It was an act of #resistance.
Today’s journalists are simply keys on a piano, which is played by higher powers-like Fusion GPS, the Obama echo chamber, bureaucrats who operate in the shadows, and ambitious congressmen angling for the spotlight. “Reporting” means joining the line for the handouts that these entirely self-interested “sources” use as weapons in their extra-constitutional wars with each other. A “scoop” means being reliable enough to get jumped to the head of the handout line. This isn’t news from nowhere-it’s weaponized dirt whose sources are concealed in order to give it the appearance of “news.”"
Why Glenn Greenwald Deserves a Pulitzer Prize
For his poignant and intrepid rebuke of the American media’s obsession with a false narrative
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/251387/why-glenn-greenwald-deserves-a-pulitzer-prize
"In August, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats announced the formation of a counterintelligence unit inside the FBI that was going to get to the bottom of national-security leaks. They were looking not just at the intelligence community but also Congress. Which is where the biggest of last week’s botched CNN stories gets even more interesting.
The email that CNN reported was part of the investigative evidence shared with the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by Republican Devin Nunes, with ranking Democratic member Adam Schiff. So a member of the committee or staffer is the likely source of the CNN leak-and it probably was not a Republican. If the mistaken date was on a document that was leaked to CNN and was part of a government sting operation-which sought to identify the leaker by altering a date on a document, and providing that document to only one member of the oversight committee-then whoever leaked that document has now been outed, and is facing some real trouble."
It would be nice to FINALLY see a Democrat going to jail for these illegal antics.
Now to the dossier and how so much of this makes no sense...
"Steele claims that two of his sources are Russian officials, including an intelligence officer. The bulk of the case for collusion rests on their information because they would be best placed to have the skinny on the Trump team’s dealings with the Kremlin. And who knows? Maybe Russian spooks really do give up secrets to anyone who asks, even a former British spy who asks long-distance questions of Russian officials through paid intermediaries.
But why on earth should we believe them? Isn’t the premise of Russiagate that Trump is bad precisely because he colluded with Russian officials? So Russian officials are conniving bastards when they seek to secretly undermine an American election by conspiring with Trump-but when they conspire with an ex-British spy to claim that Trump is conspiring with Russian officials they’re 100 percent trustworthy? Is your head spinning yet? Mine is.
Yes, the Steele dossier is nonsense. Before the election, Fusion GPS met with the executive editor of The New York Times, Dean Baquet, who passed on the biggest story on the planet. As Baquet wrote to Axios in an email: “I can say without hesitation that we were never told anything reportable about Russia that we held back at any point.” In other words: Nothing in the Steele dossier was fit to print.
Did Baquet blow a New York Times exclusive on maybe the biggest story of all time? Did Reuters blow it, too? Did all the other news organizations that threw the Steele dossier in the trash in the fall of 2016 also get the story wrong? That would certainly be news. But I don’t think it happened."
"When Barack Obama’s four intelligence chiefs briefed the newly elected president on the Steele dossier weeks before the inauguration, they re-credentialed the dossier for the press. The dossier that respectable editors-nearly all of them-had rejected in the fall was suddenly news. Why? Because now the story was about senior American spies briefing the newly elected president about a report that no respectable press outfit could verify. So now it was OK to publish it. No, wait, it was a vital public service to publish it. It was an act of #resistance.
Today’s journalists are simply keys on a piano, which is played by higher powers-like Fusion GPS, the Obama echo chamber, bureaucrats who operate in the shadows, and ambitious congressmen angling for the spotlight. “Reporting” means joining the line for the handouts that these entirely self-interested “sources” use as weapons in their extra-constitutional wars with each other. A “scoop” means being reliable enough to get jumped to the head of the handout line. This isn’t news from nowhere-it’s weaponized dirt whose sources are concealed in order to give it the appearance of “news.”"
Why Glenn Greenwald Deserves a Pulitzer Prize
For his poignant and intrepid rebuke of the American media’s obsession with a false narrative
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/251387/why-glenn-greenwald-deserves-a-pulitzer-prize