Russiagate Redux: Can’t Keep A Good Hoax Down

Authored by Frank Miele via RealClearPolitics,

When intelligence czar Tulsi Gabbard released her report last month accusing major players in the Obama administration of fabricating the Russia collusion hoax used to tarnish Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign and beyond, some of us were not surprised.

Nor were we surprised that the news media has either ignored the story or tried to discredit it. We are very familiar with that playbook, having seen major media outlets use it to perfection when 51 intelligence officials signed a letter falsely claiming that Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” That letter, signed by former CIA director John Brennan and former director of national intelligence James Clapper, probably cost Donald Trump the 2020 election, just as the Russiagate hoax was intended to derail Trump in 2016.

The New York Times, ferociously guarding its fake Pulitzer Prize from 2018, has led the way in trying to convince Americans that the evidence released by Gabbard was manufactured by Russia. But isn’t that the same tune whistled by Clapper and Brennan five years ago regarding the laptop? Anyone who believes either the CIA or the New York Times at this point either hasn’t been paying attention or is impervious to new information. I won’t try to cover all the obvious ways in which the evidence points to a massive conspiracy to defame Trump and defraud the public. You can learn about it in the reporting by Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi among others – including several reporters who write for RealClearInvestigations.

And with any luck, the originators of the Russia hoax will be brought to justice. We learned last week that Attorney General Pam Bondi has ordered a grand jury probe to investigate the culpability of Brennan, Clapper, former FBI director James Comey, and possibly even Hillary Clinton for their roles in what Gabbard called a “treasonous conspiracy” to interfere with the 2016 election and subsequently to undermine the first Trump administration.

That could take care of half the problem, but what about the other half of the conspiracy: the media allies who promoted the Russia Collusion Hoax without doing any reporting of their own other than swallowing hook, line, and sinker the fake news promoted by Clinton and the intelligence community because of their own hatred of Donald Trump? That part of the conspiracy is still alive and well.

Witness the NBC report I linked above on the grand jury probe. While it purports to be a straight news story about the possibility of charges against the purveyors of the Russia hoax, it reads more like a defense brief to clear them of criminal wrongdoing, starting with a subhead that says, “Past probes, including two conducted by Republicans, found no such crimes.”

After announcing the probe in the first two paragraphs, most of the rest of the story throws shade on it:

— “A former senior national security official pointed out that multiple past reviews, including ones conducted by Republicans, found no such crimes.”

— “Democratic lawmakers have accused the administration of seeking to distract attention from the Jeffrey Epstein case.”

— “Democrats contend that Gabbard’s talk of a treasonous Obama-era plot is patently false and a diversion.”

— “A 2020 bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee review contradicted the idea that there was a conspiracy by Obama administration officials against Trump, finding significant evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election.”

You get the idea. The media wants to dismiss Gabbard’s revelations about the origins of the Russia collusion hoax because most White House reporters were complicit in the hoax from the beginning.

Thanks to the First Amendment, neither NBC, nor CNN, nor MSNBC, nor the New York Times will ever be held accountable in a court of law for their part in propagating the fake collusion story. And so far, it appears that the Times and the Washington Post will never even have to return the Pulitzers they won in 2018 for whitewashing the phony evidence of collusion.

Nor will journalists like me ever be awarded any prizes for being right from the start. On Aug. 7, 2016, I published a column at the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Montana, just days after the conspiracy is alleged to have started, wherein I cited “a political scandal … which exceeds in scope anything seen previously in our country’s 240-year history.” But it wasn’t about Trump colluding with Russians; it was about the media colluding with Democrats and the intelligence community to try to cripple the ascendant candidacy of Donald Trump.

I called it “Mediagate.”

The context was that Wikileaks had released emails on July 22, 2016, showing the Democratic National Committee had colluded with the Clinton campaign to sabotage the competing campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders. This story should have crippled the Clinton campaign. Instead, the legacy media unleashed a barrage of anti-Trump stories that took the spotlight off Clinton.

“This was no coincidence,” I wrote, “but rather was the beginning of a concerted effort by the media to rehabilitate Hillary Clinton as the historic first woman presidential nominee in U.S. history.” As I explained at the time:

People were actually starting to ask questions about Clinton’s dubious moral character and her role in the [DNC email] scandal, but since Clinton didn’t have any answers, she did what she does best and deflected the story. Instead of explaining why she had lied for months about collaborating with the DNC to steal the election, she and her surrogates led the lapdog media to instead question whether or not the supposed Russian hackers had leaked the damaging evidence against Hillary in order to boost Trump’s chances in the election.

It was in this context that candidate Donald Trump held his famous press conference at the Trump National Doral Golf Club on July 27, 2016, to respond to the DNC email breach and to discount the notion that he was working with Putin.

In my column, I explained that Trump had launched into a humorous stream-of-consciousness riff about how the Russians, who supposedly had hacked into the DNC server, might also have “hacked into the soft target of Hillary’s private server when she was secretary of state and therefore might have copies of the thousands of ‘private’ emails which she and her lawyers had deleted.”

Trump followed up with a joke that used the Russian hacking theory about the DNC emails to take a bank shot at Hillary for her illegal email server that she used for official business as secretary of state:

“I will tell you this: Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens. That’ll be next.”

The press went wild, claiming that Trump’s quip was proof that he had a direct line to the Kremlin and that he was ordering Putin to hack Clinton’s server. This was absurd on so many levels that it seemed more like a “Saturday Night Live” skit. Suffice it to say, no one ever explained why “Russian agent” Trump didn’t just tell Putin what to do privately instead of announcing it during a press conference.

What we didn’t know at the time was that a Clinton ally named Leonard Benardo had written an email on the same day – July 27, 2016 – that claimed “HRC approved Julia’s idea about Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections” – HRC being Hillary Rodham Clinton. That email and others were concealed from the public until Gabbard declassified them last month. Of course, the New York Times and other Democrat lapdog media outlets immediately fell back on the “Russia did it” narrative to claim that the incriminating emails (like Hunter Biden’s laptop) were manufactured by Vladimir Putin and his henchmen. Fat chance.

What we now know is that Trump was right all along when he called the New York Times and the Washington Post “fake news.” And I was right when I called “Mediagate” the scandal you won’t hear about on cable news. Less than two weeks after the Russian collusion hoax started, I had already exposed it as a fraud.

So where do I go to get my Pulitzer?