RUTHFULLY YOURS

As I wrote a few days ago, the American media is broken. That description already sounds outdated as we now witness the media’s rebranding of the Obama administration’s spying on the Trump campaign as a vital national security effort: “Of course the Trump campaign was being spied on! It was for their own good!”

A brave group of journalists—aided by key amplifiers in social media, cable news, and talk radio—continues to push back on the media’s sycophantic service to the Democratic Party in which so many reporters, news personalities and political pundits are invested. Now, reporters who tried to convince us Trump was nuts for claiming Obama’s FBI spied on him are spinning hard to persuade us that an “informant” isn’t really a “spy.” But these antidotal journalists and influencers are not letting them get away with it.

My first piece highlighted the efforts of Andrew McCarthy, Mollie Hemingway, Sean Davis and Lee Smith. Here is the remainder of the group, as well as a shout-out to the influencers who have helped explain this story to the people who may not have time to read a 2,000 word article.

“Oh, what a tangled web we weave… when first we practice to deceive.”

This quote is attributed to Sir Walter Scott, a Scottish historian and novelist. Too bad he wasn’t available for a sermon at the royal wedding this past weekend, rather than social justice preacher Bishop Michael Curry. The House of Windsor certainly wove a tangled web over the decades.

The Deep State has been weaving its own tangled web of Russian collusion for the past two years beginning with Russia supposedly hacking the 2016 election, creating the electoral outcome they desired. It has since morphed into Trump colluding with the Russians, despite zero proof on the one-year anniversary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s free-for-all investigation by his merry band of partisan Democrats.

It’s now to the point that Mueller’s team is investigating anyone in Trump’s circle who ever ate a bowl of borscht or drank a sip of Russian vodka. At a time when this couldn’t get any more ridiculous, look no further than the Washington Post for a version of “can you top this?”

A few days ago, the WaPo published an opinion piece entitled, “The FBI didn’t use an informant to go after Trump. They used one to protect him.”

Sure, they did. I can’t wait to read from the WaPo how Iran wants nukes to “protect” Israel or that that sanctuary cities are for the “protection” of legal, law-abiding residents of those cities.

If you’re a fading Baby Boomer, you’re faintly amused that the FBI code-named its Trump-Russia investigation “Crossfire Hurricane.” It’s an homage to the Rolling Stones golden oldie “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” — which, come to think of it, might just be a perfect handle for John Brennan, the former Obama CIA director whose specter hovers over each critical juncture of the case.

The young’uns may not believe it, but back before it was known as “classic rock,” you couldn’t just play your crossfire hurricane on Spotify. You had to spin it. Fittingly, that is exactly what the New York Times has done in Wednesday’s blockbuster report on the origins of the Trump-Russia probe.

The quick take on the 4,100-word opus is that the Gray Lady “buried the lede.” Fair enough: You have to dig pretty deep to find that the FBI ran “at least one government informant” against the Trump campaign — and to note that the Times learned this because “current and former officials” leaked to reporters the same classified information about which, just days ago, the Justice Department shrieked “Extortion!” when Congress asked about it.

But that’s not even the most important of the buried ledes. What the Times story makes explicit, with studious understatement, is that the Obama administration used its counterintelligence powers to investigate the opposition party’s presidential campaign.

That is, there was no criminal predicate to justify an investigation of any Trump-campaign official. So, the FBI did not open a criminal investigation. Instead, the bureau opened a counterintelligence investigation and hoped that evidence of crimes committed by Trump officials would emerge. But it is an abuse of power to use counterintelligence powers, including spying and electronic surveillance, to conduct what is actually a criminal investigation.

Anyone examining FBI and Justice Department abuses is smeared and ridiculed.

President Trump is opening a whole new chapter in the war between him and the investigators pursuing him. Today, he tweeted: “I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes — and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!”

It’s unclear how the Justice Department will respond. In March, Justice’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, announced he would be examining exactly how the DOJ set about employing the so-called Steele dossier to help obtain permission from a special court, the FISA court, to eavesdrop on Trump foreign-policy adviser Carter Page. Apparently, Trump is demanding that the DOJ now look at a range of recent developments, including the news that an FBI informant was fishing for information from Trump officials before any Justice investigation of possible Trump campaign collusion with Russia was supposed to have begun.

For well more than a year, we’ve heard about the “Did Trump Collude with Russia” storyline that the special counsel Robert Mueller is pursuing. In recent months, a parallel narrative has been developing. In this account, for which a case is slowly building, figures inside the Obama administration and in the Hillary Clinton campaign may have actively spied on and tried to undermine Trump’s presidential campaign.

But anyone who broaches the thought that there might be two stories relating to 2016 campaign skullduggery rather than just one is viciously attacked. When radio and TV host Mark Levin stitched together mainstream media reports to allege that FISA-court warrants had been sought by the Justice Department to investigate Team Trump, he was branded a conspiracy theorist by Trump critics. He has since been vindicated.

Trump foes have also launched attacks against Kimberly Strassel, my former colleague at the Wall Street Journal. She has done pathbreaking reporting on the Justice Department’s refusal to turn over documents on its 2016 actions to the House Intelligence Committee, chaired Representative Devin Nunes (R., Calif.).

Nunes believes that the American people deserve to know whether or not their intelligence agencies have followed the law.

On Friday, the Washington Post’s David von Drehle sniffed that “there’s nothing surprising about pundits under the influence of the president attacking U.S. intelligence agencies while minimizing the threat from Russia.”

But it’s Nunes who has faced the most vitriolic attacks. Nunes believes that the American people deserve to know whether or not their intelligence agencies have followed the law. “Someone has to watch the watchers,” he told me recently. “The Constitution vests Congress with oversight powers over the executive branch.”

But that’s not how the media see it. Last month, Jason Zengerle of the New York Times wrote a scathing profile of Nunes, whom he dismissed in a tweet as someone “who’s been propagating (and/or falling for) conspiracy theories since before the Deep State was even a gleam in Donald Trump’s eye.”

1.I Helped Start the Gaza Protests. I Don’t Regret It. by Ahmed Abu Ratima, New York Times

2. A Grotesque Spectacle in Jerusalem Michelle Goldberg, New York Times

3. Trump’s Failure in Jerusalem New York Times

4. A Hope ‘Each Bullet Was Justified’: Israelis Reflect on Gaza Deaths A day after their soldiers killed 60 mostly unarmed Palestinians in Gaza, Israelis were defiant, defensive or blasé. By ISABEL KERSHNER and DAVID M. HALBFINGER

5.Amid Debate and Violence, Trump Delivers Embassy Victory to Christian Base By ELIZABETH DIAS

What is it with NBC News? If you thought they’d hit rock bottom, you may have to revisit the question with a look at national reporter Heidi Przybyla’s piece on the Gatestone Institute last month: “John Bolton presided over anti-Muslim think tank.”

This is an old-fashioned hit piece. The headline reveals the true object of the hit. John Bolton drives the left absolutely nuts. He has their number and he can call them out with great skill. This they cannot abide. Bolton was the target of Pryzbyla’s piece; Gatestone was just the club that she took to hand.

Nina Rosenwald is the founder and president of Gatestone. At the invitation of Lawrence Kadish, John and I spoke to a group including Nina in New York in 2005. She is a formidable force in her own right and one of the nicest people with whom I have had the good fortune to cross paths as a result of my work for Power Line. Meeting her was a great kick.

Since its founding, Nina has made Gatestone a go-to source of news and analysis from reporters and knowledgeable observers such as Khaled Abu Toameh, Bruce Bawer, Soeren Kern, Douglas Murray, Richard Kemp, Guy Milliere, Alan Dershowitz, and many others. We feature their work almost every day in our Picks here. It is great stuff.

Today, to take just one example, Gatestone has posted Richard Kemp’s “Smoke & mirrors: Six weeks of violence on the Gaza border.” It is more informative than the sum total of everything else NBC News has on offer today.

The American media are broken.

Part one of a two-part series.

After eight years of feeding the Obama cult of personality—swooning over his suave personal traits, covering for mistakes and misconduct, applying little if any scrutiny to his policies or performance—the news media suddenly developed a keen interest in presidential accountability and integrity on November 9, 2016.

Since the day Donald Trump won the election over their strenuous objections, the media have been out to get the man they deem unworthy of the presidency. They have teamed up with the Left of and the NeverTrump Right to campaign for his removal from office. (Victor Davis Hanson recently documented #TheResistance’s full list of tactics.) Trump’s family, aides, and cabinet members have been harassed and reviled in despicable ways.

Reporters eagerly transcribe salacious stories pitched by unnamed sources to incite an already inflamed body politic. Events are twisted in grotesque ways to fuel the anti-Trump hysteria. (Look no further than this week’s reporting on the Hamas-led “protest” during the opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem.)

At the same time, the American media arrogantly portray themselves as martyrs—even heroes—for acting as bulwarks against a purportedly devious, inept and cruel administration. The self-puffery on display at last month’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner sounded like war veterans commending each other for bravery on the battlefield, although veterans are far more modest than your average cable news anchor or political pundit.

But it took the self-assured comfort that comes from getting too comfortable with such puffery to draw the media out, unwittingly perhaps, at that very event. For it was at the White House Correspondents dinner that they acknowledged their sycophancy to #TheResistance, their gullibility in being snookered by Obama loyalists, their flat-on-their-back willingness to be used by anti-Trump pimps.

CNN won an award for its January 2017 report about President-elect Trump being briefed on the bogus Steele dossier. While we now know the story was improperly leaked by former Director of National Intelligence (and virulent Trump foe) James Clapper to shotgun the Trump-Russia collusion plotline days before the inauguration—and the celebrated CNN reporters did little more than regurgitate talking points spoon-fed to them by political operatives (one is known to have close ties to Fusion GPS)—the network was applauded for its “depth of reporting.”

On Tuesday, the New York Daily News ran with another of its desperate appeals for circulation. This time, it blamed Ivanka Trump for Hamas-generated violence in the Gaza Strip.

The cover featured a grinning Ivanka, dressed to the nines, at the inauguration of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem. But instead of her gesturing to the placard featured on the new embassy, the Daily News photoshopped in a photo of a wounded Palestinian on the Gaza border — so now Ivanka was gesturing at Palestinian suffering, a smile spread broadly across her face. The headline: “DADDY’S LITTLE GHOUL.”
This is absolutely abhorrent. It’s also reflective of the media coverage of both the Trump administration and Israel overall. The media have been repeating Hamas propaganda — and, presumably, they know it. They’ve been claiming that Israel is killing “protesters,” even though these are Hamas-led riots. They’ve been claiming that Israel has been targeting civilians, when it is clear this is not the case. And now they’re claiming that the Trump administration is to blame. The Washington Post headlined, “Israelis kill dozens of Palestinians in Gaza protesting U.S. Embassy move to Jerusalem.”

The violence in the Gaza Strip has been ongoing for weeks, and has been entirely orchestrated by Hamas. Palestinians, including Hamas terrorists, have been throwing Molotov cocktails at Israeli troops, as well as explosive devices and stones; they’ve been burning tires and attempting to cut through the border fence with wirecutters. The Israel Defense Forces spokesperson, Ronen Manelis, says Hamas is paying families to protest, and that they have intelligence that Hamas seeks to kidnap an Israeli soldier.