Nolte: Top 51 Fake News ‘Bombshells’ the Media Spread About RussiaGate Collusion Hoax Hall of Shame
By John Nolte
Here are the top 51 pieces of fake news the establishment media spread about the Russia Collusion Hoax over the past two years, and I describe this list as the Top 51 because there is a behemoth of an iceberg lurking below.
Since the release of the Mueller Report last week, which — despite two years, $30 million, and a team of rabidly partisan left-wing investigators — found exactly zero crimes of Russia collusion or obstruction associated with President Trump and his campaign, one of the most bizarre results has been watching the media pat themselves on the back for the stories they believe they got correct.
Imagine that. Imagine your industry is so broken and corrupt that all you have left is to point to what you believe you did right. This is like watching an airline pilot brag about the times he didn’t crash, a district attorney point to the people he prosecuted who were not innocent — or in the words of comedian Chris Rock, a parent boast about taking care of his kids.
You’re supposed to take care of your kids!
And the media are supposed to get stories correct.
But here is the media forced to brag on when they didn’t crash the plane, when they did take care of the kids, which tells you something is horribly, terribly, ridiculously wrong.
Hey, here are some examples of when we didn’t mislead the country with disinformation!
Check out this one below. Here you have a reporter forced to focus on the “highlights” of her outlet’s reporting because the Washington Post got so much wrong she was able to quickly cobble together a list of those times the Post did not mislead its readers:
While a list of what the media might have gotten correct is fairly easy to put together, no one will ever be able to grasp the tsunami of fake news Americans were buried under for over two years.
The list below of 51 might sound like a lot, but it is a drop in the ocean when you recall the thousands and thousands of hours CNN, MSNBC, Meet the Press, This Week, PBS NewsHour, State of the Union, Good Morning America, Reliable Sources, and the Today Show devoted to anchors and pundits pushing the hoax that Trump colluded with Russia.
Not to mention, millions and millions of establishment media tweets and Facebook posts.
Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell, Shepard Smith, Andrew Napolitano, Joe Scarborough, Chris Hayes, Chuck Todd, Joy Reid, Chris Matthews, Jake Tapper, Don Lemon, Chris Cuomo, Brian Stelter, Erin Burnett, et al., are alone responsible for thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of lies and conspiracy-mongering.
This list of 51 doesn’t count the half-million — half-MILLION — Russia collusion stories published over the past two years, almost all of which were premised on the idea that Trump did, indeed, collude with a foreign power to steal the 2016 presidential election.
This list cannot begin to count the countless times these 51 fake stories were repeated as fact throughout other news outlets, social media, and thousands upon thousands of cumulative broadcast hours.
What’s more, this list of 51 can’t begin to count the countless examples of fake news launched against Trump that have nothing to do with Russia — desperate and deliberate lies involving fish food and ice cream scoops…
Before we begin, credit where it’s due. This list would not have been possible without the lists already compiled by Sharyl Attkisson, Glenn Greenwald, and Sohrab Ahmari.
Michael Cohen went to Prague.
Trump directed Michael Cohen to lie, and Mueller has emails proving it.
Paul Manafort passed polling information to Kremlin.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein forced out.
Federal investigators wiretapped Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen, have recordings of Trump.
Phony Russia dossier was initially funded by Republican group.
Donald Trump directed Flynn to make contact with Russian officials during the 2016 presidential campaign
Russian social media company provided documents to Senate about communications with Trump official.
- CNN:
Donald Trump Jr. conspired with WikiLeaks.
Robert Mueller subpoenaed Trump’s Deutsche Bank records.
Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort worked with Russia intelligence-connected official as late as December 2017.
Trump Deputy National Security adviser K.T. McFarland lied about another official’s contacts with Russians.
- CNN:
Trump’s campaign was never wiretapped.
Manafort notes from Russian meeting refer to political contributions.
Seventeen intelligence agencies concur Russia hacked the 2016 presidential race.
- CNN:
Congress investigating Russian investment fund with ties to Trump officials.
Former FBI Director James Comey says Attorney General Jeff Sessions told him not to call Russia probe an investigation but “a matter.”
- CNN:
James Comey will testify he never told Trump he was not under investigation.
Putin admits he has compromising information about Trump.
Trump fired Comey after Comey asked for additional resources for the Russia investigation.
Numerous contacts between Trump campaign staff and “senior Russian intelligence officials.”
Among others, a Trump family member will be indicted on February 8.
Paul Manafort visited WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange on three occasions.
Trump campaign changed GOP platform on Ukraine.
Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions lied about meeting with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
Michael Cohen really did visit Prague.
- CNN:
Trump is lying when he calls Russia dossier “phony.”
RT had hacked into and taken over C-SPAN and C-SPAN “confirmed” it had been hacked.
Russia’s hacked the election systems of 21 American states.
Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont.
“More than 200 websites” were “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season.”
Russia is the main suspect in the sonic attacks that sickened 26 U.S. diplomats.
Trump created a secret Internet server to covertly communicate with a Russian bank.
- CNN:
Donald Trump knew in advance of the Trump Tower meeting.
- CNN:
Mueller Report will show Trump “has helped” Putin “destabilize” the United States.
- NBC:
Russia supports Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI).
-
- CNN:
Sessions failed to disclose meetings he had with the Russian ambassador.
“There’s actually lots of evidence of Trump-Russia collusion.”
Trump revealed classified information to Russians.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said Russia paid Trump.
Mueller can show Trump campaign “had a connection to Russian intelligence.”
“Rudy Giuliani just told America that Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia.”
Evidence suggests Trump could be a Russian “asset.”
- NBC:
Russians began hacking Hillary Clinton’s emails on the day Donald Trump joked about it in July 2016.
Russia spy visited Trump’s Oval Office.
- CNN:
Phony Russia dossier has been “corroborated.”
- NPR:
Donald Trump Jr. lied under oath about Trump Tower deal in Moscow.
Russia successfully hacked voting systems in a number of states.
- CNN:
Trump is “bonkers” for claiming Hillary Clinton behind Russia dossier.
- CNN:
“Every intelligence expert, both under the Obama administration and under the Trump administration,” agrees with the assessment that Russia attempted to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
- BBC:
Ukrainian president “authorized” an illegal payment of $400,000 to Michael Cohen for additional face time during a June 2017 meeting with President Trump.
MSM defends ‘extremely accurate’ Russiagate coverage despite Mueller report
Even with the ‘Russian collusion’ narrative buried by the Mueller report, some mainstream journalists have come out to claim their anti-Trump coverage was backed up by the report. Were they reading a different report?
The Mueller report, CNN’s Shimon Prokupecz said on Thursday, “really corroborated a lot of the good journalism that was done” during the last two years.
“One of my main conclusions from the #MuellerReport so far is that the vast majority of *reporting* on Trump and Russia was extremely accurate,” GQ magazine’s Julia Ioffe chimed in.
Prokupecz is not entirely wrong. Both CNN and Mueller’s team shared an obsession with chronicling every last inconsequential encounter between anyone connected to candidate Trump and anyone remotely connected to Russia, no matter how peripheral. From handshakes at the Republican National Convention to missed calls and unanswered emails, Mueller’s report is completely absent of bombshells, but heavy on humdrum contacts.
When it came to examining these tidbits, however, they were often completely wrong.
Both Mueller and the media focused heavily on the infamous Trump Tower meeting, during which Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner met with a Russian delegation to discuss US/Russian relations, and potentially damaging information to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The meeting was, as Kushner told Manafort, a “waste of time,” and no information was provided.
Not to CNN, who reported the “collusion bombshell” that President Trump knew about the meeting in advance, accompanying the headline with the lede: “holy crap.” Of course, the source for the article was none other than former Trump lawyer and convicted perjurer Michael Cohen, but that didn’t stop CNN from suggesting that Cohen’s word could “be the biggest step to date in proving real collusion,” and finishing with the poetic and barf-inducing: “Where have you gone Robert Mueller? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.”
Well, Mueller was investigating, and found “no documentary evidence” that Trump knew about the meeting or its “Russian connection.” Sorry CNN.
And it wasn’t just Trump tower. CNN claimed that Trump Jr. was given “advanced access” to the WikiLeaks archive of leaked Democratic Party emails in 2016. Mueller’s report proved this to be false, and even at the time CNN issued a retraction. A year later, three CNN employees resigned over a false story about an alleged investigation into “a Russian investment fund with ties to Trump officials.”
CNN was far from the only outlet to cry collusion where Mueller found none. Buzzfeed famously broke the scoop earlier this year that Trump had directly instructed Cohen to lie to Congress about shelved plans to build a Trump Tower property in Moscow. Buzzfeed’s lie was so egregious that Mueller himself spoke out and denied it, three months before the report landed.
As the media peddled conspiracy after conspiracy about Trump and Russia, Mueller’s team combed through federal statutes, looking for a way to make something stick. They ultimately failed to “establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
CNN had circled the wagons ever since Attorney General William Barr released a summary of the report’s main findings late last month, with host Jake Tapper claiming “I don’t know anybody that got anything wrong” in the network’s two years of puffing from the collusion crack pipe.
“We never stated that there was conspiracy/collusion,” Tapper tweeted at the time. “Yes some others did.”
CNN certainly dropped enough “collusion bombshells,” and regularly featured guests who swore up and down that collusion had taken place. Tapper himself seemed happy to send his Twitter followers to articles claiming the same, including one from the Washington Post entitled “bungled collusion is still collusion.”
Now, several weeks and a full report later, the business end of that crack pipe is still hot to the touch. After a panel discussion attacking Attorney General Barr for his “excessive” pronouncement that there was “no collusion,” CNN’s chief legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin drew his own conclusion, tweeting that Trump’s frustration with the investigation against him was somehow “evidence of guilt.”’
Never change, CNN.
HAPPENING: OBAMA WHITE HOUSE COUNSEL INDICTED FOR LYING TO MUELLER TEAM
First of many indictments to come in wake of now-completed FBI probe into Russia-Trump collusion
APRIL 11, 2019
An attorney for the White House under President Barack Obama has been indicted by the Trump Justice Department for allegedly lying about his lobbying work for a former Ukrainian president.
On Thursday DOJ charged former White House Counsel Greg Craig with two counts of making false statements regarding his connections to former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.
In a twist of irony, Craig’s alleged dealings were brought to light by FBI Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, making him the first Democrat to be indicted as a result of the now-completed probe.
“The Washington-based lawyer was indicted by a grand jury in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia for allegedly falsifying and concealing “material facts” and making false statements to the DOJ National Security Division’s Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) Unit, which is responsible for enforcing foreign lobbying laws,” reports Fox News.
“Craig allegedly made false statements to investigators looking into whether he appropriately registered foreign agent under FARA, which requires lobbyists to declare publicly if they represent foreign leaders, governments or their political parties.”
In the indictment [see below], Craig is quoted as asking a partner in a February 12 email: “I don’t want to register as a foreign agent under FARA. I think we don’t have to with this assignment, yes?”
Craig allegedly lobbied for Yanukovych in 2012 while he served as a partner at the Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom law firm, helping the ousted president write a report defending his government’s decision to prosecute the country’s former prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko.
“Craig’s former law firm… reached a settlement with the Justice Department in January to resolve an investigation into the firm’s role in working on the Tymoshenko report and the subsequent public relations rollout,” reports Buzzfeed News. “The firm didn’t face criminal charges, but agreed to retroactively register as an agent for a foreign government and pay the US Treasury $4.6 million, representing the money the firm earned for its work.”
The settlement, Buzzfeed notes, cleared the firm as an entity, notably excluding individual partners who could later be charged.
The indictment charges Craig purposely avoided registering as a foreign agent for various purposes and benefits.
“The purpose of the scheme was for Craig to avoid registration as an agent of Ukraine,” the indictment reads. “Registration would require disclosure of the fact that Private Ukrainian had paid Craig and the Law Firm more than $4 million … [and] undermine the Report and Craig’s perceived independence; and impair the ability of Craig and others at the Law Firm to later return to government positions.”
According to Fox News,
Craig faces a total of up to 10 years in prison — up to five years and a possible $250,000 fine for allegedly willfully falsifying and concealing material facts from the FARA Unit, and another five years and $10,000 fine for making false and misleading statements to the FARA Unit.
“Mr. Craig is not guilty of any charge and the government’s stubborn insistence on prosecuting Mr. Craig is a misguided abuse of prosecutorial discretion,” Craig’s lawyers argued in a statement.
Each charge against Craig carries a maximum punishment of up to five years in prison.
Craig served as White House lawyer under President Barack Obama from 2009-2010 and previously served as assistant to the Bill Clinton White House, where he defended Clinton against impeachment.
Read the full indictment below:
PROOF: John McCain Lied to Reporters About Leaking the Steele Dossier to BuzzFeed
The late Senator became enraged when a reporter asked him about the document.
By
A former Senator who went to his grave hating President Donald J. Trump lied when was asked by a reporter whether he had leaked the bogus Steele Dossier, and became enraged that she would question his “integrity.”
“As soon as I got it, I gave it to the director of the FBI,” McCain told a reporter upon questioning.
Kerry Picket at Grabien dug up the audio file of the interview.
The reporter kept digging, asking if BuzzFeed or any other media outlet had access to the unverified and salacious document, which, at that point, had been leaked to the media by an anonymous source.
“Damned if I know,” McCain shot back. “How would I know? I didn’t give anybody any . I looked at it, I took it over to the Director of the FBI.”
He also indignantly assured the reporter that no one else in his office had access to it, or could have leaked it, telling her “I was the only one who had it.”
He then took a question from another reporter, and used his response to back the Trump administration. The first reporter then followed up with another question about the dossier, and McCain became enraged.
“I will repeat to you: I was told about it, someone went over and got it, it was given to me and me only – my safe. As soon as I saw it, I called up the FBI, and I said ‘I have this, I’m not having any copies, I’m not having anything to do with it, I’m giving it to you.’”
“Look, how many times do I have to tell you?” he asked. “How many times do I have to answer your question? You are questioning my integrity right now. The answer is no. Please don’t ask it again. I gave it to no one except the Director of the FBI, and I don’t know why you’re digging this up now.”
But McCain’s defense was shredded by a December court filing, which claimed that a friend of his handed over the Democrat-funded, British spy’s work to BuzzFeed.
A longtime associate of late Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain provided a copy of the infamous Steele dossier to BuzzFeed News, according to an explosive court filing released Wednesday.
David Kramer, a former State Department official who was an executive at the McCain Institute, met on Dec. 29, 2016 with BuzzFeed reporter Ken Bensinger, according to a filing submitted Wednesday by U.S. District Court Judge Ursula Ungaro.
Trump has not given up on his longtime feud with the late Senator, whom he blames for derailing the ObamaCare repeal despite campaigning on a promise to get rid of President Barack H. Obama’s signature legislation.
Trump Tweeted about the court docs proving that McCain handed over the dossier to BuzzFeed two weeks ago.
Big League Politics reported:
President Donald J. Trump took a swipe at late former Senator and failed presidential candidate John McCain for his role in spreading the bogus, never verified Steele Dossier.
“So it was indeed (just proven in court papers) ‘last in his class’ (Annapolis) John McCain that sent the Fake Dossier to the FBI and Media hoping to have it printed BEFORE the Election. He & the Dems, working together, failed (as usual). Even the Fake News refused this garbage!” Trump said on Twitter.
McCain admitted in a memoir written before he died that he handed the Clinton campaign funded dossier over to disgraced former FBI director James Comey because he felt “duty demanded it.” He also said that “anybody who doesn’t like it can go to hell.”
Trump was miffed upon finding out that McCain gave the dossier to Comey before the election, and insinuated that McCain was trying to influence the results of the election.
JUDICIAL WATCH SUES FOR RECORDS OF COMMUNICATION BETWEEN CLAPPER, BRENNAN, CNN
Watchdog files FOIA to unearth truth about Steele dossier
MARCH 28, 2019
Dossier-Related Communications Between Clapper and ex-CIA Director John Brennan also Sought
(Washington, DC) — Judicial Watch announced today it has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) seeking records of communications between former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan and CNN around the time the Clinton-Democrat National Committee Trump dossier was being pitched to key media outlets.
A House report detailed that Clapper leaked information regarding the dossier to CNN in January 2017. The former ODNI chief signed on as an analyst for CNN in August 2017.
Judicial Watch is also seeking records of communications between Clapper and Obama CIA Director John Brennan regarding the dossier , which was authored by former British spy and FBI payee Christopher Steele.
Judicial Watch filed the lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia (Judicial Watch v. Office of the Director of National Intelligence and Central Intelligence Agency (No. 1:19-cv-00776)) after the agencies failed to respond to an April 23, 2018 FOIA request seeking:
All records of communication, including emails (whether on .gov or non-.gov email accounts), text messages and instant chats, between officials in the office of the Director of National Intelligence, including but not limited to James Clapper, and employees, representatives and contractors of CNN.
The time frame for the records request is May 2016 through May 2017.
All records of communications between the office of the Director of Central Intelligence and representatives of CNN; DCI John Brennan and DNI James Clapper regarding the collection of memos known as the “Steele Dossier:” and between DCI John Brennan and DNI James Clapper regarding CNN.
All records of communication, including emails (whether on .gov or non-.gov email accounts), text messages and instant chats, between officials in the office of the Director of Central Intelligence, including but not limited to DCI John Brennan, and employees, representatives and contractors of CNN. The time frame for the requested records is May 2016 through May 2017.
All records of communication, including emails (whether on .gov or non-.gov email accounts), text messages and instant chats, between DCI John Brennan and DNI James Clapper regarding the collection of memos known as the “Steele Dossier”. The time frame for records requested in this bullet item is May 2016 through January 2017.
All records of communication, including emails (whether on .gov or non-.gov email accounts), text messages and instant chats, between DCI John Brennan and DNI James Clapper regarding the news network CNN. The time frame for records requested in this bullet item is May 2016 through January 2017.
In a March 2018, report, Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee said, “Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, now a CNN national security analyst, provided inconsistent testimony to the Committee about his contacts with the media, including CNN.” And, “when questioned by the Committee … Clapper admitted that he confirmed the existence of the dossier to the media.
Clapper later admitted he had discussed the Steele dossier with CNN’s Jake Tapper and other journalists in early 2017, shortly before President Donald Trump’s inauguration.
In a January 10, 2017 report with bylines from Tapper, Evan Perez, Jim Sciutto and Carl Bernstein, CNN first revealed that then-FBI Director James Comey had briefed then-President-elect Trump on the dossier’s allegations.
The Intelligence Committee’s report said that “Clapper subsequently acknowledged discussing the ‘dossier with CNN journalist Jake Tapper,’ and admitted that he might have spoken with other journalists about the same topic. Clapper’s discussion with Tapper took place in ‘early January 2017,’ around the time [intelligence officials] briefed President Obama and President-elect Trump, on ‘the Christopher Steele information.’”
Shortly after CNN’s January 10, 2017 report, BuzzFeed News published the dossier in full.
The four CNN reporters were awarded the White House Correspondents’ Association’s Merriman Smith Award for their coverage of the dossier story.
Brennan, in an interview with NBC News on February 4, 2018 insisted that the Steele dossier “did not play any role whatsoever” in early intelligence assessments on alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Several subsequent reports strongly contradict Brennan’s claim.
In a June 4, 2018 report for National Review, Victor Davis Hanson noted that Brennan “served as a stealthy conduit” to ensure the dossier was “disseminated widely.”
Hanson wrote: “Brennan, in May 2017, as an ex-CIA director, again almost certainly did not tell the truth to Congress when he testified in answer to Rep. Tray Gowdy’s questions that he neither knew who had commissioned the Steele dossier nor had the CIA relied on its contents for any action. Yet both the retired National Security Agency director, Michael Rogers, and the former director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, have conceded that the Steele dossier — along with the knowledge that it was a Clinton-campaign-funded project — most certainly did help shape the Obama intelligence communality interagency assessments and actions, often under the urging of Brennan himself.”
“Judicial Watch is again in court trying to get the truth about the Obama gang illegal leaks and conspiracy targeting President Trump,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said. “Clapper and Brennan were key proponents of the big lie, exposed by the Mueller report, that President Trump colluded with the Russians. Judicial Watch FOIA litigation is the best hope for getting full accountability on this attack on our constitutional republic.”
Breaking: Rep. Doug Collins Releases Nellie Ohr Testimony Transcript Before House Judiciary Committee — Contributing ‘Author’ of Phony Dossier
March 28, 2019
In December 2017 the head of opposition research firm Fusion GPS admitted in a court filing that his firm paid Nellie Ohr, the wife of senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, to help dig up damaging information on then-candidate Donald Trump.
The connections between Nellie Ohr and the ‘Spygate’ scandal were hidden at a distance for months.
As noted previously at TGP, Nellie Ohr is a Communist sympathizer connected to Russia as well as a corrupt Never-Trumper.
Author Diana West at the American Spectator posted an article on Nellie Ohr last year. Nellie Ohr is “the “dossier” spying scandal’s woman in the middle.”
To one side of Ohr, there is the Fusion GPS team, including fellow contractor Christopher Steele. To the other, there is husband Bruce Ohr, who, until his “dossier”-related demotion, was No. 4 man at the Department of Justice, and a key contact there for Steele.
What’s more revealing about Nellie Ohr is the men in her life are protecting her involvement in the Russia scandal:
Notably, the “dossier” men in her life have tried to shield Ohr from public scrutiny, even at professional risk. Her husband, as the Daily Caller News Foundation reports, failed to disclose his wife’s employment with Fusion GPS and seek the appropriate conflict-of-interest waiver, which may have been an important factor in his demotion from associate deputy attorney general late last year.
Under Senate and House questioning, Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson consistently failed to disclose Nellie Ohr’s existence as one of his firm’s paid Russian experts, let alone that he hired her for the red-hot DNC/Clinton campaign Trump-Russia project.
Even Christopher Steele may have tried to keep Nellie Ohr “under cover.” Steele, put forth as the “dossier” author ever since its January 2017 publication in BuzzFeed, does not appear to have let on to his many media and political contacts that he had “dossier”-assistance from at least two fellow Fusion GPS Russian experts, Nellie Ohr and Edward Baumgartner. Baumgartner, interestingly, was a Russian history major at Vassar in the 1990s when Nellie Ohr taught Russian history there.
It appears that the men in Nellie’s life did all they could to prevent Nellie Ohr from being outed for being involved in the dossier because she also has links to the CIA and therefore to John Brennan.
Now this…
New evidence suggests Nellie Ohr was working for the CIA and Fusion GPS when she passed on the junk Trump-Russia dossier and information on the Trump Children to the DOJ-FBI.
Via The Last Refuge – Conservative Treehouse:
1) Having thread the @JudicialWatch docs, one thing is flippin’ certain, Nellie Ohr was always working for the U.S.… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…—
TheLastRefuge (@TheLastRefuge2) March 08, 2019
The latest FOIA requests indicate Nellie Ohr was working for the DOJ in 2015-2016.
This means Nellie Ohr was working for Fusion GPS AND the DOJ at the same time.
On Wednesday night during his interview with Sean Hannity – President Trump called Nellie Ohr the author of the phony dossier.
Nellie Ohr has deep involvement with the creation of this fraudulent document.
On Thursday Rep. Doug Collins released the Nellie Ohr testimony in front of the House Judiciary Committee.
19 Politicians, Hollywood Stars, Media Elites Who Fantasized for Years About Mueller Indicting Trump Repeatedly Claimed Mueller ‘Closing In’
By Alana Mastrangelo
Politicians, Hollywood stars, and media elites spent roughly two years echoing the words “Mueller is closing in” as they fantasized about President Donald Trump and his family being indicted over so-called Russian collusion during the 2016 presidential election. But on Sunday, the Department of Justice announced that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation did not find evidence that the president’s campaign “conspired or coordinated” with the Russian government, “despite multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign.”
“To my fellow Trump critics: Do not despair. Do not give up. Do not reduce your outrage,” tweeted actor Tony Schwartz reacting to the president’s 2017 tax bill, “Tax cuts are a fake victory that will come back to haunt him & Republicans. Mueller is closing in on Trump, I promise!”
“If true, the Buzzfeed story is a political earthquake. Caution: we really know little; Mueller knows much. Time to be steady, let facts lead us to truth — The walls do appear to be closing in.” tweeted journalist Dan Rather in reference to an anti-Trump BuzzFeed report from January, which turned out to be fake news.
Check out a few more of the politicians, Hollywood stars, and media elites who fantasized about “Mueller closing in” on the president and his family over the Russia collusion hoax.
First son Donald Trump Jr. said in a statement on Sunday that Attorney General William Barr’s letter to Congress on the Mueller report has finally proven “what those of us with sane minds have known all along.”
As for everybody else, their focus appears to be shifting onto the Attorney General and even the Special Counsel, as House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY) calls on William Barr to testify before Congress, and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) floats the idea of subpoenaing Robert Mueller.
‘Master spy’ Christopher Steele admits he used unverified internet post to create Trump dossier
President Donald Trump has once again lashed out at his political opponents after the ex-spy responsible for the infamous ‘Steele dossier’ admitted that he used an unverified internet post as a source while compiling the dubious document.
Christopher Steele, the ex-British spy who fueled Russiagate hysteria with his DNC-commissioned opposition research on Donald Trump, admitted during a lawsuit deposition that he relied on unverified information contained in a report publishedby CNN iReport – a now-defunct “user-generated” news site. Stories featured on iReport were submitted by citizen journalists and were not edited, fact-checked, or screened before being published.
Steele acknowledged under questioning that he had used a July 28, 2009 report published on iReport to substantiate claims he made about internet hosting company Webzilla and its alleged Kremlin ties. However, the former British intel officer insisted that he thought iReport boasted the same thorough journalistic standards as CNN.
When asked if he understood that content on the site was not generated by CNN reporters, he said, “I do not.” He was then asked: “Do you understand that they have no connection to any CNN reporters?” Steele replied, “I do not.”
He was pressed further: “Do you understand that CNN iReports are or were nothing more than any random individuals’ assertions on the Internet?” Steele replied: “No, I, obviously, presume that if it is on a CNN site that it has some kind of CNN status. Albeit that it may be an independent person posting on the site.”
Webzilla is among the list of plaintiffs suing Buzzfeed for defamation, after the media outlet published Steele’s findings in full in January 2017, with a disclaimer that they hadn’t verified it.
The president, who has long denied the salacious allegations contained in Steele’s report, mocked the former MI6 spy and his Democratic sponsors in a tweet.
“Report: Christopher Steele backed up his Democrat & Crooked Hillary paid for Fake & Unverified Dossier with information he got from ‘send in watchers’ of low ratings CNN. This is the info that got us the Witch Hunt!” Trump wrote.
While devout Russiagate disciples insist that the revelation changes nothing, many on social media expressed disbelief that anything in Steele’s dossier could still be taken seriously.
“Turns out Master Spy Christopher Steele was every bit as careful, conscientious, and meticulous as we thought he was,”Byron York, chief political correspondent for the Washington Examiner, joked.
Steele’s admission comes amid growing skepticism over the dossier’s key allegations. In December, Michael Isikoff, one of the first journalists to report on the document, conceded that Steele’s central claims were “likely false.”
Coincidentally, Isikoff’s explosive report on alleged Trump-Russia links was cited extensively by the FBI to secure a warrant to spy on Trump adviser Carter Page.
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