RUTHFULLY YOURS

Special Counsel John Durham, pursuing a case against Democratic Party lawyer Michael Sussmann for lying to the FBI in a conspiracy to push the Russia “collusion” swindle, recently shared communications involving Fusion GPS and various reporters. Durham says he is in possession of “hundreds of emails in which Fusion GPS employees shared raw, unverified, and uncorroborated information — including their own draft research and work product — with reporters.”

One of these exchanges concerns a breathless piece from Slate in 2016, tying the Trump Organization’s email server to the Russian Alfa Bank. You may remember that the story dropped only a week before the 2016 presidential election. One of the first big Russia-hoax pieces, it would become the template for many others to come. In one email, Franklin Foer, then at Slate, passes on his raw copy to Fusion GPS, which was working for Hillary at the time, and asks the outfit to look it over for “omissions and errors.” Once the information was repackaged into a news story, Hillary sent out a release claiming that “computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank.”

We shouldn’t kid ourselves. This is how politicians launder oppo info. In movies, precocious reporters stake out office buildings, rummage through garbage, flip through piles of documents, and uncover dusty folders in the back of old cabinets. For the most part, that’s a fantasy. It’s about access. Most big scoops are handed to reporters — whose greatest skill is being lucky enough to have landed in powerful positions — by the political opposition. And, in my book, there’s nothing unethical about passing along info that’s true, no matter who the source is.

But modern journalists should possess a high level of skepticism and the ability to synthesize information for mass consumption. What they shouldn’t do is let political operatives write and edit their stories. Even in my small world, working at a Denver newspaper years ago, I knew that information that seemed too good to be true almost always was. Certainly, I didn’t go to a Republican political operative or biased conservative “expert” to verify the fundamentals.

Ten years ago, Foer, now at the Atlantic, would have been fired and probably have a difficult time finding another job in journalism. Even if you had given him, and many reporters who acted in the same manner, the benefit of the doubt — people get duped sometimes or misunderstand data — it’s clear now that he was in on it. Foer wasn’t just checking for factual discrepancies from one of the subjects of his story — even then, handing over a story to an outsider is unprofessional. He put his trust in Fusion GPS and unscrupulously passed on their version of events. (It should be noted that not every reporter acted in this manner. When Fusion GPS was selling a story about Carter Page’s supposed investments and meetings with Russians, the Washington Post’s Tom Hamburger responded that sources had told him “its bullsh** [sic].” But that sort of professionalism seems rare.)

This is almost surely how most of the Russia collusion stories were hatched. A political operative, if not from Fusion GPS then from Adam Schiff’s office, approaches a journalist at the New York Times or the Washington Post or CNN and gets him to bite. Ben Rhodes famously explained how easy it was to deceive starry-eyed, clueless reporters into aping the Obama administration’s misleading talking points on the Iran deal. The difference: By 2017, it was clear that many political reporters were willful participants in fueling fake news. By 2020, they were actively suppressing news they didn’t like.

Foer’s new boss at the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, recently seen hosting a “disinformation” conference, pulled a similar stunt in 2020, reporting that Donald Trump had besmirched dead soldiers — which political journalists had no problem widely sharing as an irrefutable and unimpeachable fact even as they engaged in a concerted effort to ignore the Hunter Biden story. By that time, however, journalists had learned that they could pass on uncorroborated pieces by keeping them sufficiently opaque and impossible to disprove. No real evidence was offered for the Trump-hates-vets piece, other than the word of Goldberg, who spent eight years as stenographer for Barack Obama. Plausible or not, a story that thin would never have been published pre-2015 in any major publication.

The Russia-collusion narrative began around the time of the fake Alfa Bank story and ended around the time of the fake “Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops” story. Sara Fischer at Axios recently called the Steele dossier “one of the most egregious journalistic errors in modern history.” It’s always been highly doubtful that any of it was an error. These emails are just more evidence.