Guardian online edition, left; Guardian print edition, right.

That the Guardian story would be seen as an earth-shattering revelation — one that would bring massive amounts of traffic, attention, glory, and revenue to the paper — was obvious. And that’s precisely how it was treated, as it instantly ricocheted around the media ecosystem with predictable viral speed: “The ultimate Whoa If True. It’s … [the] ballgame if true,” pronounced MSNBC’s Chris Hayes who, unlike many media figures reacting to the story, sounded some skepticism: “The sourcing on this is a bit thin, or at least obscured.”

But Hayes’s cable news colleague Ari Melber opened his MSNBC show that night excitedly touting The Guardian’s scoop, while meticulously connecting all the new inflammatory dots it uncovered, asking one guest: “How does this bombshell impact the collusion part of the probe”?

From the start, the massive holes in The Guardian’s blockbuster were glaring. As I noted on the day the story published, analysts from across the political spectrum — including those quite hostile to Assange — expressed serious doubts about the article’s sourcing, internal logic, self-evidently dubious assertions, and overall veracity, even as many media figures uncritically trumpeted it.

In particular:

• How could it be that Manafort, of all people, snuck into one of the most monitored, surveilled, videoed, and photographed buildings on the planet on three separate occasions without any of that ostensibly “smoking gun” visual evidence having emerged, including in The Guardian’s own story?
• Why would The Guardian publish a story of this magnitude without first requiring that its Ecuadoran intelligence sources provide them with such photographic or video evidence to publish it or at least review prior to publication?
• How could it be that Manafort’s name never appeared in any of the embassy entrance logs even though, as The Guardian itself admitted, “visitors normally register with embassy security guards and show their passports”?
• What was the bizarre, sensationalistic reference to “Russians” that The Guardian included in its article but never bothered to explain (“separate internal document written by Ecuador’s Senain intelligence agency and seen by The Guardian lists ‘Paul Manaford [sic]’ as one of several well-known guests. It also mentions ‘Russians'”).

Five weeks later, all of these questions remain unanswered. That’s because The Guardian — which likes to pride itself on flamboyantly demanding transparency and accountability from everyone else — has refused to provide any of its own.

In lieu of addressing the increasingly embarrassing scandal, The Guardian’s top editors and reporters on this story have practically gone into hiding, ignoring all requests for comment and referring journalists to a corporate PR official who provides a statement that is as vague and bureaucratic as it is non-responsive. It’s easier to get a substantive comment from the National Security Agency than from The Guardian on this story.

The Guardian’s stonewalling appears even more unjustified given the affirmative attacks on the truth of its central claims. The former consul and first secretary at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, Fidel Narváez, said emphatically in an interview with the British outlet The Canary that The Guardian story was “a fake” and provided that outlet with a formal complaint to the paper, in which he said at least one other story from the same Ecuadorian intelligence sources was also fabricated.

The Guardian’s refusal to address any of the very serious questions raised by its own article persisted even after one of the world’s largest newspapers, the Washington Post, published a major story on the paper’s debacle, noting: “One week after publication, the Guardian’s bombshell looks as though it could be a dud.”

The Post’s media reporter Paul Farhi joined the other critics of The Guardian’s story in documenting the multiple gaping holes in its reporting, including the bizarrely disappearing and highly sketchy third reporter, the fact that “no other news organization has been able to corroborate the Guardian’s reporting to substantiate its central claim of a meeting,” that the paper began almost immediately tweaking the language of its story to soften its certainty (a practice highly unusual for a story of this significance, where responsible editors would ensure that every word was accurate before publishing it), that “the story doesn’t specify the date of the alleged meeting,” that “no photos or video of Manafort entering the embassy have emerged,” and that “the Guardian is silent about whether its reporters saw any such photographic evidence.”

The Guardian’s typically public and outspoken editor-in-chief Kath Viner has all but disappeared since the story was published on November 27. Since then, she stopped tweeting entirely except to commemorate the November 30 death of a Guardian columnist. Harding has also tweeted just once since then. And both have ignored these questions submitted by The Intercept, as well as similar inquiries from other reporters:

None of this is an aberration. Quite the contrary, it has become par for the Trump-Russia course. One major story after the next falls apart, and there is no accountability, reckoning, or transparency (neither CNN nor MSNBC, for instance, have to date bothered to explain how they both “independently confirmed” the totally false story that Donald Trump, Jr. was offered advanced access to the WikiLeaks email archive, all based on false claims about the date of an email to him from a random member of the public).

Nor is it atypical for The Guardian when it comes to its institutionally blinding contempt for Assange: During the election, the paper was forced to retract its viral report from political reporter Ben Jacobs, who decided to assert, without any whiff of basis, that Assange has a “long had a close relationship with the Putin regime.”

The U.S media has become very adept at outrage rituals whenever they are denounced as “fake news.” They should spend some time trying to become as skilled in figuring out why such attacks resonate for so many.

The post Five Weeks After The Guardian’s Viral Blockbuster Assange-Manafort Scoop, No Evidence Has Emerged — Just Stonewalling appeared first on The Intercept.

CNN’s headquarters in Atlanta, Ga., on Aug. 1, 2014.

On Monday night, CNN host Don Lemon led a panel discussion with three CNN commentators as they gleefully heaped scorn on Kanye West for meeting with President Trump to discuss prison reform and for otherwise expressing support for the President (the video is below). Among other things, West was pilloried for being both ignorant and exploited. “Kanye West is what happens when Negroes don’t read,” CNN’s Bakari Sellers said. CNN’s Tara Setmayer pronounced him “the token Negro of the Trump administration.”

While those comments received some attention (only from conservative outlets, needless to say), the laughter-driven attacks on West for his well-publicized medical treatment for mental health issues were largely ignored. But those comments, broadcast in prime-time by CNN on television and then widely disseminated by the network on social media, were not just reprehensible, but genuinely dangerous.

“No one should be taking Kanye West seriously,” Setmayer decreed. Why not? Because, she said, “he clearly has issues. He’s already been hospitalized.” Let’s repeat that: No one should be taking Kanye West seriously. He clearly has issues. He’s already been hospitalized.

Setmayer was referring to West’s 2016 hospitalization in Los Angeles’s Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. In 2018, West spoke publicly and bravely about that hospitalization and the medical treatment he has received for his mental health struggles, including a bipolar diagnosis. West described how his doctors found the right balance of medication and therapies and he decided to speak publicly about his medical treatment because, in his words, “I want to change the stigma of mental health.”

A screenshot of the Teen Vogue article discussing West’s mental health discussion.

That was precisely the stigma that CNN and its various personalities exploited, played with and strengthened by weaponizing West’s medical treatment against him, using it to disqualify him as someone who can be regarded as credible or serious.

After mocking West for his hospitalization, Setmayer quickly added: “You know not to trivialize mental health issues” – something she had just blatantly done and then proceeded immediately to do again, adding: “but I mean obviously, Kanye has taken a turn in a very strange way. You read any of his interviews, go back and read his interview with Charlamagne tha God. It’s all over the place.” Not only did Lemon nor any of the other panelists object, but they maintained their laughing, giggling tone as this mockery was spouted.

Amazingly, after the segment was aired, CNN seemed not to be ashamed but quite proud of it, as it promoted it online to its Twitter audience:

.@Bakari_Sellers: "My issue with Kanye West is quite simple — is that anti-intellectualism simply isn't cool." https://t.co/FVeCRODqXl pic.twitter.com/rhH5nWSubZ

— CNN Tonight (@CNNTonight) October 10, 2018

It should go without saying that West, as a public figure expressing controversial political views, is fair game to be criticized, harshly or otherwise, for the substance of what he says and does. But exploiting his medical treatment for mental health issues to declare him unworthy of being heard, or being incapable of cogent thought, is grotesque.

Mental health professionals, particularly those who specialize in the effects of social stigma on individuals with mental illness, have told the Intercept that the kinds of comments aired by CNN often prevent patients from seeking the treatment they need due to the shame associated with these conditions – a fear-driven failure that frequently results in allowing these conditions to go untreated, sometimes leading to permanent depression, incapacity and even suicide.

Worse, they said, the CNN discussion exploited, and lent credibility to, bigoted attitudes toward people who have been treated for mental health conditions, attitudes which often prevent them from finding employment or even shelter.

Psychology Professor Patrick Corrigan, one of the nation’s leading scholars on the harms of societal stigmas attached to mental health treatment and the author of a new book entitled “The Stigma Effect,” told the Intercept that Setmayer’s comments “are troubling even if one does not like Donald Trump or his constituency.” The commentary from CNN, he said, “is stigma – in the same category as racism and sexism. It tries to minimize someone’s opinion not because of the spirit of the message, but because mental illness is some kind of slur against one’s character.”

Professor Corrigan emphasized that this “stigma’s effects are not trivial. Research quite clearly shows employers don’t want to hire people with mental illness. Landlords don’t want to rent to them. Health care professionals provide a substandard level of care. And all of this is due to the stigmatizing label.”

A screenshot of an article in the Association for Psychological Science discussing research around the stigma of mental illness.

In a 2014 research article published by Corrigan and two other scholars, entitled “The Impact of Mental Illness Stigma on Seeking and Participating in Mental Health Care,” data shows that while “treatments have been developed and tested to successfully reduce the symptoms and disabilities of many mental illnesses,” many “people distressed by these illnesses often do not seek out services or choose to fully engage in them. One factor that impedes care seeking and undermines the service system is mental illness stigma.” The paper added:

Stigma is a significant barrier to care seeking and participation (Corrigan, 2004). More than 100 peer-reviewed, empirical articles have been published supporting some aspect of how stigma serves as a barrier (Clement et al., 2013). Research has demonstrated stigma to be a problem for elders (Graham et al., 2003), adults (Vogel, Wade, & Hackler, 2007), adolescents (Chandra & Minkovitz, 2007), and children (Adler & Wahl, 1998).

One of the most damaging stereotypes, the paper documented, is that “people with mental illness are often seen as incompetent” –  precisely the stereotype CNN peddled about West. As the researchers put it: “people attempt to escape the unfair loss of opportunity that comes with stigmatizing labels by not going to clinics or interacting with mental health providers with whom the prejudice is associated (Corrigan, 2004). (The fear is that someone will think, ‘Hey that guy coming out of the psychiatrist’s office must be wacko and incompetent!’).”

Another leading scholar on the damage done from mental health stigma, Psychology Professor Stephen Hinshaw of the University of California at Berkeley, said of the CNN segment that while “mental illness” is real, “using the term to cast aspersions on what an individual is saying or doing (a) takes away the underlying message and meaning and (b) clearly contributes to the still-pervasive stigma related to mental illness, even in 2018.”

Professor Hinshaw noted the “long history of discounting someone’s political views by attributing them to an underlying mental illness. After all,” he told the Intercept, “if you’re crazy, then anything you say can be completely discounted.” Indeed, as Professor Hinshaw noted, exploiting mental health diagnoses to malign and discredit political adversaries has a long and truly ugly lineage.

As the Chicago Tribune reported in 2007, “the Soviet Union routinely locked up dissidents in asylums,” and post-Soviet Russian authorities “are increasingly returning to psychiatry to suppress political opponents or punish activists, according to human-rights organizations and other watchdog groups.” China’s abuse of psychiatric treatment to malign dissidents is well-documented. And in the U.S., weaponizing mental health diagnoses to marginalize dissidents has been a common practice.

What makes CNN’s willingness to stigmatize mental health treatment all the more reprehensible is that just four months ago, their own colleague, CNN host Anthony Bourdain, committed suicide just days after fashion designer Kate Spade had done the same thing. Those high-profile suicides provoked a much-needed national discussion about what headlines called “the dangers of mental health stigma.”

Chef Anthony Bourdain speaks onstage with Patrick Radden Keefe at the New York Society for Ethical Culture on Oct. 7, 2017 in New York City.

As one article on Bourdain and Spade’s deaths put it in citing a new report from the Center for Disease Control: “In 2016 alone, nearly 45,000 people in the United States took their own lives, making suicide the 10th leading cause of death.” One major factor is that “those living with the mental health struggles that lead to suicide often don’t seek treatment or open up to friends and family about their deep despair.” The reason is that people from all social classes – including those in the public eye – “feel the need to hide their suffering because of the heavy stigma that surrounds mental illness.”

To watch Bourdain’s own network, CNN, promote a reckless, giggly segment a mere four month after his tragic death that explicitly endorses and wields this stigma – by pronouncing that those who struggle with mental health issues should not be taken seriously and have no role in public discourse – is nothing short of sickening.

This, of course, is all part and parcel of what has become the anything-goes mentality when it comes to demonizing those perceived as insufficiently critical of Trump. We’ve seen Democrats and allied media figures similarly embrace homophobia and reckless jingoism when they believe doing so is justified because their goals are politically noble.

But what CNN just did is a new – and uniquely dangerous – low in this gutter game. There are all sorts of legitimate ways to critique and even mock Kanye West if that’s what one wants to do. Laughingly exploiting the fact that he previously received medical treatment for mental health conditions is the opposite of legitimate. It’s the precise behavior that has driven people with mental health issues underground, hiding in shame, and too afraid – for good reason – to seek the treatment they need and deserve out of fear that people like the ones who composed this CNN panel will use it against them.

The post Mental Health Professionals Denounce CNN and Don Lemon’s Show for Mocking and Stigmatizing Kanye West’s Hospitalization appeared first on The Intercept.

Four decades ago, Halper was responsible for a long-forgotten spying scandal involving the 1980 election, in which the Reagan campaign – using CIA officials managed by Halper, reportedly under the direction of former CIA Director and then-Vice-Presidential candidate George H.W. Bush – got caught running a spying operation from inside the Carter administration. The plot involved CIA operatives passing classified information about Carter’s foreign policy to Reagan campaign officials in order to ensure the Reagan campaign knew of any foreign policy decisions that Carter was considering.

Over the past several weeks, House Republicans have been claiming that the FBI during the 2016 election used an operative to spy on the Trump campaign, and they triggered outrage within the FBI by trying to learn his identity. The controversy escalated when President Trump joined the fray on Friday morning. “Reports are there was indeed at least one FBI representative implanted, for political purposes, into my campaign for president,” Trump tweeted, adding: “It took place very early on, and long before the phony Russia Hoax became a “hot” Fake News story. If true – all time biggest political scandal!”

In response, the DOJ and the FBI’s various media spokespeople did not deny the core accusation, but quibbled with the language (the FBI used an “informant,” not a “spy”), and then began using increasingly strident language to warn that exposing his name would jeopardize his life and those of others, and also put American national security at grave risk. On May 8, the Washington Post described the informant as “a top-secret intelligence source” and cited DOJ officials as arguing that disclosure of his name “could risk lives by potentially exposing the source, a U.S. citizen who has provided intelligence to the CIA and FBI.”

The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner, who spent much of last week working to ensure confirmation of Trump’s choice to lead the CIA, Gina Haspel, actually threatened his own colleagues in Congress with criminal prosecution if they tried to obtain the identity of the informant. “Anyone who is entrusted with our nation’s highest secrets should act with the gravity and seriousness of purpose that knowledge deserves,” Warner said.

But now, as a result of some very odd choices by the nation’s largest media outlets, everyone knows the name of the FBI’s informant: Stefan Halper. And Halper’s history is quite troubling, particularly his central role in the scandal in the 1980 election. Equally troubling are the DOJ and FBI’s highly inflammatory and, at best, misleading claims that they made to try to prevent Halper’s identity from being reported.

To begin with, it’s obviously notable that the person the FBI used to monitor the Trump campaign is the same person who worked as a CIA operative running that 1980 Presidential election spying campaign.

It was not until several years after Reagan’s victory over Carter did this scandal emerge. It was leaked by right-wing officials inside the Reagan administration who wanted to undermine officials they regarded as too moderate, including then White House Chief of Staff James Baker, who was a Bush loyalist.

The NYT in 1983 said the Reagan campaign spying operation “involved a number of retired Central Intelligence Agency officials and was highly secretive.” The article, by then-NYT reporter Leslie Gelb, added that its “sources identified Stefan A. Halper, a campaign aide involved in providing 24-hour news updates and policy ideas to the traveling Reagan party, as the person in charge.” Halper, now 73, had also worked with Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Alexander Haig as part of the Nixon administration.

When the scandal first broke in 1983, the UPI suggested that Halper’s handler for this operation was Reagan’s Vice Presidential candidate, George H.W. Bush, who had been the CIA Director and worked there with Halper’s father-in-law, former CIA Deputy Director Ray Cline, who worked on Bush’s 1980 presidential campaign before Bush ultimately became Reagan’s Vice President. It quoted a former Reagan campaign official as blaming the leak on “conservatives [who] are trying to manipulate the Jimmy Carter papers controversy to force the ouster of White House Chief of Staff James Baker.”

Halper, through his CIA work, has extensive ties to the Bush family. Few remember that the CIA’s perceived meddling in the 1980 election – its open support for its former Director, George H.W. Bush to become President – was a somewhat serious political controversy. And Halper was in that middle of that, too.

In 1980, the Washington Post published an article reporting on the extremely unusual and quite aggressive involvement of the CIA in the 1980 presidential campaign. “Simply put, no presidential campaign in recent memory — perhaps ever — has attracted as much support from the intelligence community as the campaign of former CIA director Bush,” the article said.

Though there was nothing illegal about ex-CIA officials uniting to put a former CIA Director in the Oval Office, the paper said “there are some rumblings of uneasiness in the intelligence network.” It specifically identified Cline as one of the most prominent CIA official working openly for Bush, noting that he “recommended his son-in-law, Stefan A. Halper, a former Nixon White House aide, be hired as Bush’s director of policy development and research.”

In 2016, top officials from the intelligence community similarly rallied around Hillary Clinton. As The Intercept has previously documented:

Former acting CIA Director Michael Morell not only endorsed Clinton in the New York Times but claimed that “Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.” George W. Bush’s CIA and NSA director, Gen. Michael Hayden, pronounced Trump a “clear and present danger” to U.S. national security and then, less than a week before the election, went to the Washington Post to warn that “Donald Trump really does sound a lot like Vladimir Putin” and said Trump is “the useful fool, some naif, manipulated by Moscow, secretly held in contempt, but whose blind support is happily accepted and exploited.”

So as it turns out, the informant used by the FBI in 2016 to gather information on the Trump campaign was not some previously unknown, top-secret asset whose exposure as an operative could jeopardize lives. Quite the contrary: his decades of work for the CIA – including his role in an obviously unethical if not criminal spying operation during the 1980 presidential campaign – is quite publicly known.

And now, as a result of some baffling choices by the nation’s largest news organizations as well as their anonymous sources inside the U.S. Government, Stefan Halper’s work for the FBI during the 2016 is also publicly known

Last night, both the Washington Post and New York Times – whose reporters, like pretty much everyone in Washington, knew exactly who the FBI informant is – published articles that, while deferring to the FBI’s demands by not naming him, provided so many details about him that it made it extremely easy to know exactly who it is. The NYT described the FBI informant as “an American academic who teaches in Britain” and who “made contact late that summer with” George Papadopoulos and “also met repeatedly in the ensuing months with the other aide, Carter Page.” The Post similarly called him “a retired American professor” who met with Page “at a symposium about the White House race held at a British university.”

In contrast to the picture purposely painted by the DOJ and its allies that this informant was some of sort super-secret, high-level, covert intelligence asset, the NYT described him as what he actually is: “the informant is well known in Washington circles, having served in previous Republican administrations and as a source of information for the C.I.A. in past years.”

Despite how “well known” he is in Washington, and despite publishing so many details about him that anyone with Google would be able to instantly know his name, the Post and the NYT nonetheless bizarrely refused to identity him, with the Post justifying its decision that it “is not reporting his name following warnings from U.S. intelligence officials that exposing him could endanger him or his contacts.” The NYT was less melodramatic about it, citing a general policy: the NYT “has learned the source’s identity but typically does not name informants to preserve their safety,” it said.

In other words, both the NYT and the Post chose to provide so many details about the FBI informant that everyone would know exactly who it was, while coyly pretending that they were obeying FBI demands not to name him. How does that make sense? Either these newspapers believe the FBI’s grave warnings that national security and lives would be endangered if it were known who they used as their informant (in which case those papers should not publish any details that would make his exposure likely), or they believe that the FBI (as usual) was just invoking false national security justifications to hide information it unjustly wants to keep from the public (in which case the newspapers should name him).

In any event, publication of those articles by the NYT and Post last night made it completely obvious who the FBI informant was, because the Daily Caller’s investigative reporter Chuck Ross on Thursday had published an article reporting that a long-time CIA operative who is now a professor at Cambridge repeatedly met with Papadopoulos and Page. The article, in its opening paragraph, named the professor, Stefan Halper, and described him as “a University of Cambridge professor with CIA and MI6 contacts.”

Ross’ article, using public information, recounted at length Halper’s long-standing ties to the CIA, including the fact that his father-in-law, Ray Cline, was a top CIA official during the Cold War, and that Halper himself had long worked with both the CIA and its British counterpart, the MI6. As Ross wrote: “at Cambridge, Halper has worked closely with Dearlove, the former chief of MI6. In recent years they have directed the Cambridge Security Initiative, a non-profit intelligence consulting group that lists ‘UK and US government agencies’ among its clients.”

Both the NYT and Washington Post reporters boasted, with seeming pride, about the fact that they did not name the informant even as they published all the details which made it simple to identify him. But NBC News – citing Ross’ report and other public information – decided to name him, while stressing that it has not confirmed that he actually worked as an FBI informant:

The professor who met with both Page and Papadopoulos is Stefan Halper, a former official in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations who has been a paid consultant to an internal Pentagon think tank known as the Office of Net Assessment, consulting on Russia and China issues, according to public records.

“The professor who met with both Page and Papadopoulos is Stefan Halper, a former official in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations who has been a paid consultant to an internal Pentagon think tank known as the Office of Net Assessment.” https://t.co/8Jdu8XqtbI

— Ken Dilanian (@KenDilanianNBC) May 19, 2018

There is nothing inherently untoward, or even unusual, about the FBI using informants in an investigation. One would expect them to do so. But the use of Halper in this case, and the bizarre claims made to conceal his identity, do raise some questions that merit further inquiry.

To begin with, the New York Times reported in December of last year that the FBI investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia began when George Papadopoulos drunkenly boasted to an Australian diplomat about Russian dirt on Hillary Clinton. It was the disclosure of this episode by the Australians that “led the F.B.I. to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia’s attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump’s associates conspired,” the NYT claimed.

But it now seems clear that Halper’s attempts to gather information for the FBI began before that. “The professor’s interactions with Trump advisers began a few weeks before the opening of the investigation, when Page met the professor at the British symposium,” the Post reported. While it’s not rare for the FBI to gather information before formally opening an investigation, Halper’s earlier snooping does call into question the accuracy of the NYT’s claim that it was the drunken Papadopoulos ramblings that first prompted the FBI’s interest in these possible connections. And it suggests that CIA operatives, apparently working with at least some factions within the FBI, were trying to gather information about the Trump campaign earlier than had been previously reported.

Then there are questions about what appear to be some fairly substantial government payments to Halper throughout 2016. Halper continues to be listed as a “vendor” by websites that track payments by the federal government to private contractors.

Earlier this week, records of payments were found that were made during 2016 to Halper by the Department of Defense’s Office of Net Assessment, though it not possible from these records to know the exact work for which these payments were made. The Pentagon office that paid Halper in 2016, according to a 2015 Washington Post story on its new duties, “reports directly to Secretary of Defense and focuses heavily on future threats, has a $10 million budget.”

It is difficult to understand how identifying someone whose connections to the CIA is a matter of such public record, and who has a long and well-known history of working on spying programs involving presidential elections on behalf of the intelligence community, could possibly endanger lives or lead to grave national security harm. It isn’t as though Halper has been some sort of covert, stealth undercover asset for the CIA who just got exposed. Quite the contrary: that he’s a spy embedded in the U.S. intelligence community would be known to anyone with internet access.

Equally strange are the semantic games which journalists are playing in order to claim that this revelation disproves, rather than proves, Trump’s allegation that the FBI “spied” on his campaign. This bizarre exchange between CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski and the New York Times’ Trip Gabriel vividly illustrates the strange machinations used by journalists to justify how all of this is being characterized:

Despite what Halper actually is, the FBI and its dutiful mouthpieces have spent weeks using the most desperate language to try to hide Halper’s identity and the work he performed as part of the 2016 election. Here was the deeply emotional reaction to last night’s story from Brookings’ Benjamin Wittes, who has become a social media star by parlaying his status as Jim Comey’s best friend and long-time loyalist to security state agencies into a leading role in pushing the Trump/Russia story:

Wittes’ claim that all of this resulted in the “outing” of some sort of sensitive “intelligence source” is preposterous given how publicly known Halper’s role as a CIA operative has been for decades. But this is the scam that the FBI and people like Mark Warner have been running for two weeks: deceiving people into believing that exposing Halper’s identity would create grave national security harm by revealing some previously unknown intelligence asset.

Wittes also implies that it was Trump and Devin Nunes who are responsible for Halper’s exposure but he almost certainly has no idea of who the sources are for the NYT or the Washington Post. And note that Wittes is too cowardly to blame the institutions that actually made it easy to identify Halper – the New York Times and Washington Post – preferring instead to exploit the opportunity to depict the enemies of his friend Jim Comey as traitors.

Whatever else is true, the CIA operative and FBI informant used to gather information on the Trump campaign in the 2016 campaign has, for weeks, been falsely depicted as a sensitive intelligence asset rather than what he actually is: a long-time CIA operative with extensive links to the Bush family who was responsible for a dirty and likely illegal spying operation in the 1980 presidential election. For that reason, it’s easy to understand why many people in Washington were so desperate to conceal his identity, but that desperation had nothing to do with the lofty and noble concerns for national security they claimed were motivating them.

The post The FBI Informant Who Monitored the Trump Campaign, Stefan Halper, Oversaw a CIA Spying Operation in the 1980 Presidential Election appeared first on The Intercept.

Most people, at least in the media, seemed quick to accept Reid’s apology — and they were right to do so. People have the right to change their beliefs as they and the society around them grow, learn, and evolve. That process should be encouraged, not stigmatized. Politics, at its core, should be about persuading people to repudiate misguided and destructive beliefs and adopt ones that are more reasoned, humane, and just. And when that happens, it should be celebrated, not scorned.

In 2012, the Democratic Party officially changed its position on LGBT equality when Barack Obama “evolved” and announced his support for gay marriage, which he had previously opposed. There’s no reason to doubt that Reid (who once worked as a press aide for the Obama campaign) changed her views on LGBT people to align with the new party dogma.

Candidly acknowledging the erroneous nature of one’s previously held views is a virtue, not a character flaw. As someone who has changed many of my own views about a wide range of both political and nonpolitical questions — growth that I hope and expect will continue for as long as I live — I regard it as vital that everyone have the space to reconsider old beliefs, and not have them held against one in perpetuity once they are renounced.

All humans err, and a critical part of life — one of the parts that makes it most valuable — is learning and changing. The very first line of my first book back in 2006 was this observation from Abraham Lincoln: “I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.” That was the framework through which I, and many others, viewed Reid’s December apology.

But the last 24 hours have changed the Joy Reid situation considerably. Last week, the same left-wing Twitter user (Jamie Maz) who first unearthed Reid’s anti-gay tweets about Crist unearthed far more toxic, bigoted, and vicious anti-gay articles that appeared to be from Reid’s old blog.

Reid has removed her blog from the internet, so Maz found the articles using the “Wayback Machine,” the internet digital archive that stores old online content even after it’s been removed or deleted by the publisher. Last night, the news outlet that reports on TV news media, Mediaite, published an extensive story on these newly found articles that appear under Reid’s byline.

But unlike the posts for which Reid apologized in December — which she said were intended to mock the hypocrisy of GOP officials who are simultaneously closeted gays, but also anti-gay in their politics — these newly discovered articles have nothing to do with GOP hypocrisy. They are just hateful, bigoted, and homophobic in their own right.

Some of the lowlights, as Mediaite itemized, include:

• “defend[ing] former NBA star Tim Hardaway’s aggressively anti-gay comments by writing that while such comments are stupid for a public figure to make: ‘most straight people cringe at the sight of two men kissing’”;
• saying she “couldn’t go see [Brokeback Mountain] either, despite my sister’s ringing endorsement, because I didn’t want to watch the two male characters having sex. Does that make me homophobic? Probably”;
• arguing that “intrinsic” to being straight is finding gay sex acts “gross”;
• “defending Marine General Peter Pace after he condemned ‘homosexual acts’ as ‘immoral’ by suggesting his views are actually normal”;
• opposing Harriet Miers’s nomination to the Supreme Court by implying she is a closeted lesbian and comparing her “lesbian haircut” to those worn by the presidents of NOW and GLAAD;
• promoting the ugliest and most destructive stereotype of gay men as pedophile predators by suggesting that anti-gay attitudes are based in “concerns that adult gay men tend to be attracted to very young, post-pubescent types, bringing them ‘into the lifestyle’ in a way that many people consider to be immoral” and that “gay rights groups seek to organize very young, impressionable teens who may have an inclination that they are gay.”

There are many other similarly horrific and bigoted passages that appear under Reid’s byline on her blog — far beyond the ones she previously acknowledged and apologized for.

If, in response to these new even-uglier posts, Reid had done what she did in December — acknowledged they were hers, owned her mistakes, apologized for the hurt she caused, and explained that she no longer holds these views — the reaction would have almost certainly been the same. Though many would likely be a bit bothered by just how deeply bigoted these writings were, few would hold them against her now. I know I would have reacted the same: If someone repudiates past beliefs and changes their views, they should be judged by their current viewpoints, not ones they held a decade ago.

But, this time, acknowledging and apologizing for these viciously bigoted post isn’t what Reid did. She did the opposite: She denied that she ever wrote them — or, at least, she denied writing some of them.

How, then, did they end up on her blog under her name? According to Reid, she was the victim of “hackers”: somehow, nefarious disinformation agents managed to hack not her blog (which is now deleted), but rather the Wayback Machine and its digital archive. They penetrated the Wayback Machine and then, according to Reid, added some anti-gay content.

Notably, Reid did not deny that all of the newly discovered hate-mongering was hers. But, in a statement to Mediaite, she suggested that at least some of these horrible articles — which ones she did not specify — were added by unknown “external” hackers:

In December I learned that an unknown, external party accessed and manipulated material from my now-defunct blog, The Reid Report, to include offensive and hateful references that are fabricated and run counter to my personal beliefs and ideology.

I began working with a cyber-security expert who first identified the unauthorized activity, and we notified federal law enforcement officials of the breach. The manipulated material seems to be part of an effort to taint my character with false information by distorting a blog that ended a decade ago.

Now that the site has been compromised I can state unequivocally that it does not represent the original entries. I hope that whoever corrupted the site recognizes the pain they have caused, not just to me, but to my family and communities that I care deeply about: LGBTQ, immigrants, people of color and other marginalized groups.

Is it technically possible that hackers altered the digital archives of the Wayback Machine? Probably. After all, pretty much anything is possible.

But computer experts consulted by The Intercept said they were personally unaware of previous instances of the Wayback Machine being hacked and altered (which is not proof that it never happened). They also said that the work required to do this would be quite extensive and sophisticated. Cybersecurity expert Jeffrey Carr told The Intercept:

Regarding the Wayback Machine, I don’t know. I’ve never heard of that happening but it doesn’t mean that it couldn’t happen, I guess. Was it the very last post that she published? Because if it wasn’t (and depending upon how her blog was set up), then there may have been more than one copy that would need to be hacked. My old Blogspot blog is like that. … That’s an awful lot of work for a hacker to do, and for what end? To make a homophobic person appear MORE homophobic?

Moreover, some of Reid’s uglier, confirmed writings — not just about gay people, but also transgender people — square quite consistently with the newly discovered writing that she denies. Indeed, Reid has a far more extensive — and far more recent — record of homophobic and transphobic writing independent of the material she wrote about Charlie Crist, that postdates it and is material for which she never apologized.

Reid, for instance, was a vocal defender of the abuse doled out by the U.S. government to Chelsea Manning, which the U.N. concluded was “cruel, inhuman,” and bordering on torture; she mocked that abuse as nothing more than Manning whining that she wanted a “pillow.” Reid repeatedly suggested that Manning leaked not out of conscience or horror at what the U.S. military was doing in Iraq, but due to mental problems from being trans.

Mocking people on gender grounds, referring to men she suspects are gay as “Miss,” or implying they are trans for the sake of mockery, is a longtime Reid tactic. And she appears to have promoted, via her own tweets, at least some of the articles that she now denies:

None of this precludes her hacking claims from being true — maybe “external” actors decided to augment her confirmed bigoted, anti-LGBT writing with even more bigoted, anti-LGBT writing — but it is certainly probative on the question, given how consistent the passages she denies writing are with the ones she clearly did write.

Regardless of one’s views on Reid’s past anti-gay remarks, and regardless of what actually happened here, this is a serious news story — obviously so. And the biggest part of the story is not whether Reid wrote this anti-gay content. Again, if she did, and she acknowledged and apologized for it, that should not be held against her.

The biggest part of the story is the veracity of her remarkable claim — that she’s making not 10 years ago but now — that it was hackers who wrote the offensive material under her name.

Only one of two things can be true here, and they are both rather consequential: Either (a) hackers found a way to effectively alter the digital archives of the Wayback Machine in order to smear the name of a major TV news personality by attributing fabricated content to her, or (b) this major TV news personality is lying — not 10 years ago, but today — in order to falsely deny authorship of her own journalism.

Given the important issues at stake that liberal media outlets have vocally elevated as crucial — LGBT equality, combating bigotry, the security and reliability of online information, the dangers posed by hacking, journalistic integrity — one would think that they would be quite interested in this story and the critical questions it raises. But one would be quite wrong in assuming this.

The extraordinary claims from Reid that she was hacked by cunning and malicious actors has received substantial media attention — but only from conservatives sites such as Fox News and Hot Air (which asks some quite good questions):

So four months ago, Reid took ownership of the mocking remarks found on her old blog, even adding “there’s no excusing it.” Now she’s saying it wasn’t her at all and the FBI has been notified. Why didn’t she realize the problem before she apologized last year? Why didn’t she mention that she believed the site had been hacked until this new, unflattering material was revealed?

Mediaite notes that the person who sent them the fresh examples also sent them links to the internet archive showing where the screengrabs came from. However, the entire site is now gone from the archive so it’s no longer possible to see the archives of The Reid Report.

One way an archive can be removed is by the owner of the site adding a robots.txt file which tells the Internet Archive to exclude the site. Another way is to email the site and ask them to remove it. So it seems that, sometime after the story broke last December, Joy Reid had the archive taken down. Did she do that because she knew it had been hacked or because it was embarrassing? It seems she was embarrassed by it last year but now it’s someone else’s fault entirely.

A CNN reporter, Nathan McDermott, expressed subtle yet obvious skepticism: “Joy Reid uses the old, ‘I was hacked!’ defense after newly discovered homophobic posts from her blog were revealed.” (By “old,” perhaps McDermott was referencing the fact that Anthony Weiner, along with many others, originally claimed his accounts had been “hacked” when embarrassing material was revealed under his name.)

By very stark and notable contrast, liberal news outlets and liberal journalists have steadfastly ignored the story almost completely (the only exception I’ve seen is a tweet from the editor of one large liberal blog who suggested that Vladimir Putin was behind the hacking in order to ruin Reid’s reputation).

The reason liberal news sites are ignoring the story is as self-evident as it is troubling: Because Reid’s ideology is in accordance with theirs, and they therefore don’t care if she’s lying or telling the truth when denying authorship of these bigoted articles, nor do they care about the anti-LGBT bigotry itself. Those are concepts to be exploited opportunistically for partisan gain; they are devoid of any actual conviction. Their silence on this latest, incredibly strange episode involving one of their iconic media personalities demonstrates that rather compellingly.

Just as right-wing sites would be steadfastly ignoring this story if a Fox News host — in response to embarrassing articles found on their website — had claimed they were the work of bizarrely innovative and enterprising hackers, while liberal sites would be flooding the internet with detailed and indignant coverage of those claims, liberal sites are going to just pretend the Joy Reid story does not exist until it disappears. Reid knows this — she works every day with the people who run these liberal outlets and she knows exactly what their mentality is — and that’s why she feels no obligation even to address it beyond the statement she provided to Mediaite.

Reid is assuming that liberal media outlets will prioritize their ideological and partisan affinity for her over their proclaimed, profound concern for LGBT bigotry, hacking, and journalistic integrity. And on that question, at least, Reid is almost certainly right. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why trust in media institutions has collapsed to the point where people are as willing to believe what they read from fake sites as they are from established ones?

Update: April 24, 2018, 5:39 p.m.
The organization that maintains the Wayback Machine Internet Archive issued a statement this afternoon on its official blog, in response to this article and last night from Mediate’s. They write that in December, Reid’s lawyers contacted them and requested that they remove Reid’s blog from their archive on the ground that it had been tampered with. In response, they “let Reid’s lawyers know that the information provided was not sufficient for us to verify claims of manipulation” and thus “declined to take down the archives.”

In other words, they could find no evidence that Reid’s claims were true that her blog was hacked, and thus refused to remove it. Thereafter, special code was placed on Reid’s blog, presumably by Reid, that resulted in the automatic deletion of her blog from the archives.

As CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski put it, the Internet Archive’s response “basically says there’s no proof Reid’s posts were the result of hacking or tampering, adding, ‘Reid’s claim regarding the point of manipulation is still unclear to us.'”

Correction: April 24, 2018
In discussing Reid’s multiple articles implying that former Gov. Crist was gay but in the closet, this article used a phrase inadvertently suggesting that he has subsequently come out as gay. He never has; Crist continues to maintain he is not gay. That phrase has been removed.

The post MSNBC’s Joy Reid Claims Her Website Was Hacked and Bigoted Anti-LGBT Content Added, a Bizarre Story Liberal Outlets Ignore appeared first on The Intercept.

Those horrifying statistics are just for the U.S. Extreme human deprivation and suffering is pervasive all over the planet: hundreds of millions of human beings live in unimaginable poverty. According to the 2016 comprehensive World Bank study on global inequality, “767 million people are estimated to have been living below the international poverty line of US$1.90 per person per day. Almost 11 people in every 100 in the world, or 10.7 percent of the global population, were poor by this standard.” There is an “estimated 780 million illiterate adults worldwide, nearly two-thirds are women.”

The World Health Organization found in July of last year that “some 3 in 10 people worldwide, or 2.1 billion, lack access to safe, readily available water at home, and 6 in 10, or 4.5 billion, lack safely managed sanitation.” If one adds in non-human animals — from abandoned, starving pets to industrial systemic cruelty toward farm animals — the amount of deprivation and poverty-caused suffering in the world is virtually endless.

Actual charities in the U.S., non-profits that provide critical services to their communities, have been plagued by extreme financial difficulties for years. In January, the Journal Sentinel, citing a new report, explained that “the financial health of the nation’s community-based organizations — or CBOs — is increasingly precarious.”

Large numbers of Americans lack the ability to secure basic legal representation even when charged with serious crimes. One major reason that the U.S. imprisons more people than any other country in the world — both in terms of absolute numbers and proportionally — is that legal aid services have been continually slashed to the point where poor people and even those who are lower-middle-class have little chance of having competent, zealous representation, because of how overworked public defenders are.

As a result of these severe financial constraints in the legal system, citizens are often forced to plead guilty and accept prison terms because it’s their only viable option. As the Guardian wondered in 2016: “How many of the 30 defendants present for a single ‘mass plea’ hearing in Louisiana’s 16th judicial district in June would have pleaded not guilty if they’d had more than 20 seconds of legal counsel?”

In the midst of all of this need, struggle, misery and deprivation, a just-created online charity fund is enjoying massive success and an extraordinary outpouring of donations from small donors. It has become one of the most successful pages on the popular GoFundMe site: a campaign to raise money for former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe (pictured, above, next to Attorney General Jeff Sessions last year). Created just 48 hours ago with the goal of raising $250,000 for McCabe’s “legal defense fund,” it has already doubled that amount — to over $500,000 — and shows no sign of slowing down, as donations continue to pour in as of publication of this article.

The funds will be used for his attorneys’ fees for various legal fights he faces. Those courtroom battles relate to a report from the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General which recommended that McCabe’s be fired after its investigators found that he repeatedly and deliberately lied to the FBI about his role in various leaks. Any amounts left over from this fund will be donated to a non-profit group designated by McCabe.

The original impetus for a charity drive for McCabe seems to have come from Silicon Valley investor Jason Calacanis, who two weeks ago announced on Twitter that, at the age of 47, he finally got motivated by someone’s suffering to create his very first ever GoFundMe campaign: one designed to raise funds that would go to McCabe personally. Calacanis ultimately announced he was terminating the campaign and would transfer the modest funds he received to the new fund drive for McCabe’s legal defense.

That new charity campaign received a huge boost yesterday when MSNBC’s beloved-by-Democrats host Rachel Maddow tweeted a link to the new GoFundMe campaign for McCabe to her 9.4 million followers. At the time of Maddow’s tweet — which has now been re-tweeted by 4,000 people and “liked” by another 11,000 — McCabe’s fund had $100,000. Less than 24 hours after Maddow’s viral tweet, the amount quintupled to a half-million dollars.

So here’s the nation’s 14th highest-paid TV star, just behind Blake Shelton of The Voice and the stars of Grey’s Anatomy, who earns at least $7 million per year from her Comcast salary alone (i.e, beyond her book and appearance income), successfully encouraging small donors who follow and watch her to charitably donate their money to a rich federal police officer who is married to a doctor and who lives in an extremely expensive home in the the richest county of the world’s wealthiest nation.

The next time you’re feeling pessimistic about the nature of humanity, just reflect on this touching act of compassion and empathy for the needy. By the way, the now-closed GoFundMe campaign for the family of Stephon Clark — the 22-year-old father of two young children who, while he was unarmed after he ran to his grandmother’s backyard, was gunned down by Sacramento Police with seven bullets in his back, while he took 10 minutes to die as the police officers who shot him did not call for medical help — generated $83,000 in donations, or 1/7 of what has been raised (thus far) for McCabe.

So who exactly is the recipient of this extraordinary public charity? McCabe has spent his career working at the FBI. He began working on organized crime investigations but switched to “counterterrorism” work as part of the 17-year-old U.S. “War on Terror.” He rose to the position of Deputy Director of the FBI under Jim Comey, where he worked on both the investigation into election-related hacking as well as the criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton for her private email server. It was in connection with those investigations that he was accused by the Inspector General of leaking secret information to the media and then lying about it to FBI officials.

By all metrics, McCabe and his family are financially secure; a more accurate term for them would be “quite wealthy.” As Splinter’s Paul Blest documented — in an article accurately entitled “Andrew McCabe Does Not Need Your Money” — his “average salary between 2015 and 2017, when he was in the senior leadership of the FBI, was over $157,000.” That income figure for McCabe does not count the income earned by McCabe’s wife, who is a highly accomplished medical doctor with multiple sources of income.

McCabe’s FBI salary alone put his family in the top 4-5 percentile of income for all Americans. An analysis by FactCheck.org of financial disclosures forms he filed found that, beyond that salary, “McCabe has several mutual fund accounts, including 529 college savings accounts and a 401K retirement fund, with the total value of those investment accounts ranging from $287,000 to $880,000.” While his firing significantly reduced the value of his pension (which would have been $1.8 million had he retired as scheduled: $60,000 per year until the 50-year-old McCabe died), he still will receive some pension benefits.

According to public property records, the McCabes purchased their Northern Virginia home in 2006 for a price of $715,000, which means it’s worth far more than that now, as real state prices in that region have skyrocketed. Indeed, the McCabes’ home almost doubled in value from 2003, when it was sold to the prior owners, to 2006, when the McCabes purchased it. The expensive house in which the McCabes reside is located in Loudoun County, which, according to the latest Census Bureau report, is the single richest county in the entire United States.

And this is all independent of the massive private-sector wealth that is almost certainly making its way to McCabe as you read these words. Given the massive pre-publication success and anticipated blockbuster status of the forthcoming book by Jim Comey (just by the way, for other MSNBC hosts who may be considering promoting a GoFundMe campaign for Comey: he’s worth $11 million and received a $3 million payout from a hedge fund when he was confirmed as FBI Director), it is a virtual certainty that publishing houses will be competing to pay a hefty advance to McCabe for a tell-all book of his own, particularly given news that he kept notes on his conversations with President Trump. A cable news contract also seems likely given how many U.S. security state officials are hired by MSNBC and CNN.

Beyond the current and future wealth of the McCabe family, what makes this outpouring of charity for him so noxious is the work he’s spent his adult life doing. For many years, McCabe has gone to work every day in a building that actually — and appropriately — bears the name of J. Edgar Hoover.

The recipient of this GoFundMe campaign spent much of the last two decades as a senior official of an agency that has long been aggressively entrapping young and mentally unstable Muslims, got caught repeatedly and systematically breaking the law in spying on Americans, has been “using race and ethnicity in conducting assessments and investigations,” spied on Muslim-American political leaders and scholars, and secretly maintained a mass surveillance program with “more than 1.5 billion government and private-sector records about citizens and foreigners, the documents show, bringing the government closer than ever to implementing the ‘Total Information Awareness’ system first dreamed up by the Pentagon in the days following the Sept. 11 attacks.” Just a few months ago, the agency McCabe helped run got caught creating a special program to target black and Muslim activists in the U.S.

In one sense, this is just the latest chapter in the bizarre and infinitely ironic spectacle of Democrats venerating security state agencies such as the CIA, NSA and FBI under the banner of “resistance.” Canonizing law enforcement agents and intelligence operatives most definitely makes this history’s strangest rendition of “resistance,” a term that — until Democrats after 2016 desperately needed a re-branding campaign — had been reserved for dissidents who bravely risked imprisonment and even death fighting to subvert, not sanctify, state security agencies that perform those functions.

But a charity campaign fueled by a multi-millionaire cable news host, for the benefit of a rich federal police official, is not just bizarre but obscene. If one wants to protest the tragic plight of Andrew McCabe, there are many ways to do that aside from encouraging people to donate money to his legal battles.

For anyone who works with people who are actually suffering and deprived, or who falls into the huge category of humans who experience that suffering and deprivation, or who lacks legal representation because of poverty, or who has been victimized by the FBI’s abuses and lawlessness, watching this public campaign direct a tidal wave of money to someone like McCabe is really nothing short of nauseating.

The post The $500,000 GoFundMe Charity Campaign for Wealthy Ex-FBI Official Andrew McCabe Is Obscene appeared first on The Intercept.

This was not a case in which Globo has elevated a story to major prominence. This was the opposite: Globo trying to take hold of a story that has exploded through citizen-driven online activism and anger without any need for bolstering from major media outlets.

For once, Brazil’s major media has been a bystander in this story, not its driver. Globo could see that the reaction to Marielle’s killing was growing, getting stronger, moving in directions that make many Brazilian elites extremely uncomfortable. Last night’s “Fantastico” coverage was Globo’s attempt to get this story under control — under its control.

There were parts of “Fantastico’s” reporting that were genuinely informative and journalistically excellent — particularly Sonia Bridi’s detailed, evidence-based exposition of how this horrific crime was carried out with such chilling professionalism and competence, convincingly showing that whoever engineered the murders knew exactly how police would investigate and exactly how to prevent detection.

That terrorizing fact is an important piece of the puzzle when understanding who ordered Marielle to be killed; whoever killed the activist who devoted herself to denouncing police abuses is intimately familiar with how the police function.

Other parts were genuinely moving and beautifully presented, particularly the interviews with Marielle’s devastated widow Mônica, and, separately, with Marielle’s 19-year-old daughter, her parents, and her sister. The prominent inclusion of Anderson’s life and death, and the delicately handled and wrenching interview with his grieving widow, was commendable given the temptation to forget about the death of Marielle’s driver.

The show also did justice to how remarkable and inspiring was the trajectory of Marielle’s life: from poverty, deprivation, and single motherhood at 19 as a black woman in a favela to a master’s degree in sociology, human rights activism, and political empowerment through massive voter support in her 2016 election to the City Council.

This was not an insignificant media moment in Brazil. A black, leftist lesbian from the sprawling Maré favela, and from the socialist PSOL party, was honored and glorified on one of Globo’s most important media platforms, while millions of ordinary Brazilians around the country, far away from Rio and São Paulo, watched. They prominently featured, rather than hid, Marielle’s wife.

The perspectives of prominent leftist politicians and activists were respectfully included. And they condemned and vilified the right-wing politicians and judges who have used the internet to spread disgusting lies about Marielle designed to malign her with toxic stereotypes of black women from favelas (she was pregnant at 16, married to a notorious drug dealer, supported in her election by a drug gang: all demonstrable lies). All of that is worth celebrating.

But Marielle was, first and foremost, a political person: a radical in the best and most noble sense of that word. It’s her radicalism that made her such an inspiration to so many ordinary and voiceless citizens, and a threat to so many powerful and corrupt factions. Her political activism, her political beliefs, were Marielle’s core, a major part of her identity, the centerpiece of what made her a figure of such singular force and power.

The crime that ended her life was also purely political. There is no way to meaningfully understand Marielle’s life and assassination without a candid, clear, and honest discussion of her politics. What makes her story such big news is her politics, which in turn produced the political motives that caused powerful people to want her dead.

These are the most difficult, most complicated, and most important subjects to cover when reporting on Marielle’s life and death: her relentless and brave activism against the most lawless police battalions, her opposition to military intervention, and, most threateningly of all, her growing power as a black, gay woman from the favela seeking not to join Brazil’s power structure, but to subvert it.

It’s not a coincidence that the last event she attended, the one where she was followed and then killed upon leaving, was titled, “Young Black Women Changing Power Structures.”

And it was these subjects that “Fantastico” avoided almost entirely — except when they brazenly manipulated them for its own purposes. The only segment purporting to describe Marielle’s politics was an extremely banal, condescending discussion of the definition of “human rights,” which “Fantastico” basically reduced to an anodyne, uncontroversial declaration that all humans are born free and should be treated equally: propositions that virtually every Brazilian politician from right to left would happily endorse. They drained Marielle’s politics of its vibrancy, radicalism, and force, and converted it into a simplistic comic book of empty clichés that nobody would find objectionable.

Ultimately, what “Fantastico” was really up to here became extremely clear by the end of its coverage. They took the still-expanding power of Marielle’s story and tried to reduce its power — limit it — to a simple, apolitical human interest story, something that made you cry and feel sad and empathetic and maybe angry, but not in any way that would make you embrace Marielle’s causes or crusades for justice or devote yourself to the political agenda she symbolized.

Globo and its comrades in elite culture see a serious danger in the aftermath of Marielle’s killing, for good reason. They see that it is awakening — emboldening — traditionally powerless people to the cruelties of extreme societal inequality and the intolerable racist criminality of its police forces.

It is galvanizing favela residents to organize and mobilize. It is pointing an accusatory finger not at drug traffickers and ordinary criminals — the favored Globo narrative — but at the very forces used by the country’s elite to impose its will and secure its privileges: its military, its police, and its traditionally white, male, rich political system.

It was those factions and those policies which Marielle had devoted her life to fighting — not just in defense of the pleasing, unchallenging, clichéd notions of “human rights” that “Fantastico” centered. Those who feel threatened by Marielle’s activism and political principles see that her death is strengthening those things — and desperately want to re-direct these powerful emotions away from what she believed and inspired, toward something less disruptive, less threatening to status quo power.

That’s why “Fantastico” went heavy on the powerful human emotions of this story — the grieving, weeping relatives, the killing of a hardworking father who supported his baby by working as a driver, the anger we all feel when human life is violently extinguished, the mournful music that made us feel tearful — and ignored the scarier political aspects of Marielle’s life.

Globo knows it can’t stop or limit the powerful emotions, so it wants to render them apolitical and thus, harmless. It wants all of this sadness and indignation to fall into a black hole of political irrelevance, like one of the TV network’s emotion-heavy soap operas, in which Marielle’s killing has no meaning beyond just making people angrier still about the violence plaguing Brazil.

But far worse than the suppression of Marielle’s political beliefs was “Fantastico’s” one attempt to politicize her death — by trying to exploit Marielle to reinforce support for a policy that Marielle despised: Michel Temer’s recent military “intervention” in Rio de Janeiro, the first time since the end of Brazil’s military dictatorship in 1985 that the military is occupying a major city.

After 45 minutes of building emotional sadness and anger over Marielle’s death, “Fantastico” tried to channel that into manipulating, exploiting, and subverting Marielle’s political causes. Immediately following the segments about Marielle, “Fantastico” devoted one segment to the horrific killing of a child last week in a Rio slum, the Complexo do Alemão, and then immediately went live to one of its reporters in Brasília, describing how Temer was meeting that very moment with ministers to consider more funding for the military invention.

And it was at that moment “Fantastico’s” odious, menacing agenda became crystal clear. It wasn’t just to stomp out the possibility that Marielle’s killing would galvanize support for her life’s political project. It was far worse: to try to ensure that Marielle’s death could be exploited to strengthen everything she fought to subvert. The message from “Fantastico” was as obvious as it was odious: Now that we just spent all this time making you so sad and angry about Marielle’s brutal assassination, you must see why Temer’s military intervention is so justified.

PSOL officials and other left-wing activists instantly recognized the ugly agenda at play and denounced it on social media by pointing out that Marielle vehemently opposed military occupation as a gross waste of resources that would solve nothing and make everything worse, while directly threatening democracy.

Perhaps the reason I’m particularly sensitive to this distortion scheme is because I’ve seen exactly this reprehensible media tactic used so effectively in the U.S. During the 1990s, a vicious, ugly debate consumed the U.S. over whether to declare Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a federal holiday.

And it was easy to understand why this was so controversial. King was a true radical, hated by many. He railed against the evils of capitalism. He urged the most oppressed populations to rise up. He uncompromisingly condemened U.S. imperialism. In a speech given one year before he was killed, devoted to denouncing the U.S. role Vietnam War, he called the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” as well as the leading exponent of “the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long.”

So, if you’re an American political or economic elite, and know that you can’t erase the memory of someone with such threatening, disruptive views, what do you do? You erase all the views that you find threatening when allowing him to be celebrated, and convert what he symbolizes into something simplistic, clichéd, and unthreatening. On King’s holiday, his contempt for capitalism and denunciations of U.S. imperialism are rarely mentioned. Few Americans know about them now. He is instead just spoken of as a symbol of elementary, vague conceptions of racial equality that few people outside of malicious fringes openly reject: He has been reduced to his lowest common denominator and the genuinely disruptive parts of his worldview and activism have been deliberately erased from his history.

And just as “Fantastico” tried last night to exploit Marielle’s memory into support for a policy she had spent the last month of her life opposing — military intervention in Rio — the U.S. government now exploits the pleasant memory of MLK into support for militarism and imperialism, something he hated with all of his being. The U.S. military actually uses King’s name and image in its propaganda, as if the mere fact that its killing force is now racially integrated would make King proud and supportive of U.S. violence and its various killing machines:

This is what many in Brazilian media and political elites are now trying to do with Marielle. They know she will not be forgotten, and that the anger and disgust at her brutal assassination is not going away. So the project is now underway to drain her of her radicalism and disruptive energy and instead, convert her into a generic and pleasant symbol, so that they can exploit her for their own ends, including to generate support for status quo-perpetuating policies that she loathed.

Last night’s “Fantastico” episode was the first step in that project. It’s the responsibility of those who believe in Marielle’s vision and activism — not just in Brazil, but around the world — not to allow this gross revisionism and exploitation to succeed.

Disclosure: Glenn Greenwald’s husband, David Miranda, served alongside Marielle in the Rio de Janeiro City Council, in the same party, and she was a personal friend of both.

The post Just as U.S. Media Does With MLK, Brazil’s Media Is Trying to Whitewash and Exploit Marielle Franco’s Political Radicalism appeared first on The Intercept.

Since that article, Weiss has predictably written multiple banal columns for the Times denouncing what she perceives as growing left-wing intolerance for dissent in general, but particularly on college campuses. I’ve watched as Weiss has become celebrated in right-wing circles as some sort of paragon of free expression and academic freedom, and mourned by centrists as the tragic victim of online PC mob silencing campaigns (imagine being a columnist and editor at the New York Times — with full access to the most influential media platform in the world — and seeing yourself as the victim of silencing and censorship), even though her entire career is grounded in precisely the viewpoint suppression, vilification, and censorship campaigns she now depicts herself as loathing.

All of this finally came to a head last night after Weiss published yet another column complaining that she and her ideological comrades are unfairly criticized by left-wing authoritarians who try to silence them by associating them with “fascism.” Weiss’s column was so replete with humiliating factual errors, shoddy argumentation, and glaring holes in reasoning that she ended up trending on Twitter, and her editors had to delete an entire paragraph from her column and then add an editor’s note explaining that she had cited evidence that was an obvious hoax.

In the course of the controversy, Weiss, in a tweet-essay that began here, finally addressed her own history of trying to ruin the careers of Arab and Muslim scholars for the crime of criticizing Israel. Unfortunately, she did so by falsely denying what she actually did, making demonstrably untrue claims about the controversies in which she was involved, and, worst of all, outright ignoring the most egregious example of her viewpoint-suppression campaigns:

I want to address a baseless accusation being peddled by @ggreenwald and others on this platform. When I was an undergraduate student at Columbia, I advocated for the rights of students to express their viewpoints in the classroom.

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) March 8, 2018

The campus controversies in which Weiss was involved for years are well-reported, and I wrote about and documented the facts at length in the profile I wrote of her. I’m not going to recount all of that here — those interested in the long version can read that article — but instead will just note several facts that others raised last night making clear how false Weiss’s attempt is to whitewash her long history of trying to suppress criticisms of Israel from college campuses:

(1) Anyone remotely familiar with the wars over the Middle East Studies Department at Columbia University, in which Weiss played a starring role, knows that her claim here — that the campaign was just a benign attempt to protect students’ rights — is utterly false. The campaign was designed to ruin the careers of Arab professors by equating their criticisms of Israel with racism, anti-Semitism, and bullying, and its central demand was that those professors (some of whom lacked tenure) be disciplined for their transgressions. Here is Megan Greenwell, now the editor-in-chief of Deadspin, who was the editor-in-chief of Columbia’s student newspaper during this controversy, responding last night to Weiss:

bari, i have no desire to be involved here, but your synopsis of the events of 2004/2005 is unfair. you weren't simply "advocating for students' rights," you were calling professors racist. i know because i wrote or edited most of the stories about it. https://t.co/77s7xmvsoG https://t.co/WRs5sfyh8l

— Megan Greenwell (@megreenwell) March 8, 2018

The article Greenwell references quotes Weiss as accusing multiple Arab professors critical of Israel of being racists: “We put the mentions of the publications in the film to expose the racism of these professors,” Weiss said. This is the person now using the New York Times op-ed page to complain that academics and commentators with unpopular views are the targets of unfair character assassination.

(2) That the campaign against these Arab professors was about suppressing criticisms of Israel and intimidating and punishing professors who voiced such criticisms was barely hidden. The New York Civil Liberties Union — historically reluctant to involve itself in disputes involving Israel — strongly condemned the campaign against these Arab professors at Columbia that Weiss helped to lead.

The group “called on Columbia University President Lee Bollinger to resist attacks from within and outside the university that jeopardize academic freedom at Columbia,” and it explicitly made clear that the whole point of the campaign “is whether professors teaching controversial subject matter that offends some students should be disciplined or face recrimination for expressing unpopular views in their classrooms.” (Anthony Weiner, at the time a member of Congress running for mayor of New York, was just one of many politicians who demanded that Professor Joseph Massad be fired for what he called “his displays of anti-Semitism.”) In denouncing the censorship campaign Weiss helped to lead, the NYCLU made clear that the excuse she offered last night is totally false:

It is clear that this controversy would not have acquired the attention it received if it were simply about the rudeness of professors or their intolerance of other points of view. This David Project film would not have provoked controversy had it not arisen out of the divisive political controversy involving Israel and Palestine. The attack on Professor Massad and other in the MEALAC Department is really about their scholarship and political expression.

As Professor Juan Cole wrote at the time: “The lesson for academics, and American society as a whole: McCarthyism is unacceptable except when criticism of Israel is involved.” Indeed, as Ali Abunimah noted last night, just two years ago Weiss wrote a long article accusing Massad of being an anti-Semite and lamenting that he “won tenure in 2009 despite the sustained and strong opposition of student whistleblowers, concerned alumni, and others.”

That’s what makes this whole spectacle so amazing: The New York Times is allowing one of its columnists to masquerade as a stalwart defender of campus free speech and academic pluralism while utterly ignoring, and allowing her to falsely deny, her own long history in trying to stigmatize and punish professors who criticized Israel, to the point where the NYCLU stepped in and denounced her campaign as a dangerous threat to academic freedom.

(3) The campaign against these Arab professors at Columbia generated a massive controversy that ultimately involved some of the school’s largest donors. As a result, an extensive investigation was conducted that ultimately exonerated the accused Arab scholars of anti-Semitism and other offenses. Though the investigative committee found one instance in which it said a professor had become excessively angry at a student’s defense of Israel, it concluded that it found “no evidence of any statements made by the faculty that could reasonably be construed as anti-Semitic.” The report, ironically, did find a campaign of intimidation — aimed at the Arab professors, not from them; it “describe[d] a broader environment of incivility on campus, with pro-Israel students disrupting lectures on Middle Eastern studies and some faculty members feeling that they were being spied on” — the very behavior Weiss now denounces when it comes from her ideological opponents.

As Cole noted, the report found that the kind of systematic harassment Weiss now pretends to find so objectionable was actually directed at these Arab professors by her own ideological comrades:

Although it was little noted in the press, the report did indeed acknowledge that Massad in particular and the department in general had been the target of an ongoing campaign of intimidation. It noted that for several years, after pieces appeared in the tabloid press blasting the department as anti-Israel, many non-students, clearly hostile and with ideological agendas, had been attending classes in the department, interrupting lectures with hostile asides and inhibiting classroom debate.

When the report was issued clearing these professors of virtually all the charges leveled against them and finding instead that they were the victims rather than the perpetrators of harassment campaigns, Weiss was furious and held press conferences and demonstrations to denounce it:

(4) Unfortunately for Weiss, her attempts now to revise her own history are rendered impossible by her own remarks about her activism, filmed years before she knew she would be at the center of this type of attention. As I noted in my original article, Weiss spoke on a panel at the 2012 Conference of the American Zionist Movement in which she explained (in a video on YouTube) that she “got involved in journalism through activism” — specifically, activism against Arab and Muslim professors at Columbia — and that she now devotes herself to the “connection between advocacy journalism and Zionism.” After Weiss gave her false rendition of events last night, Sacha Saeen used clips from this video to make clear that Weiss spent years doing exactly that which she now claims to find so objectionable on campuses:

Really?

Because here you are complaining about the very sort of issues which you now criticise student activists at college campuses today for. pic.twitter.com/WvHqCPGEkf

— saeen (@SaeenDiddyCombs) March 8, 2018

And while you rail against student activists at college campuses today, here you are explaining that you got involved in student activism because they weren't pro-Israel enough. pic.twitter.com/mF0y84NYcT

— saeen (@SaeenDiddyCombs) March 8, 2018

See the rest of that thread for other clips giving the lie to Weiss’s revisionism.

(5) Most egregious to me was the case that Weiss last night so notably decided to ignore: her involvement in the attempt to smear and ruin the academic career of a rising Palestinian-American professor, Nadia Abu El-Haj, for the crime of writing a book questioning the archeological claims of the Israeli government. I won’t go into all the details of this case — I wrote about it at length in that original article and it was also the subject of very lengthy reporting in the New Yorker and the New York Times — but the gist of it is crucial for understanding who Weiss really is and how false are her denials from last night.

In sum, Abu El-Haj was a rising academic star at the University of Chicago who was on a fast track toward tenure. Her 2002 book anthropologically examining Jewish claims to a biblical entitlement of Israel won numerous awards and praise from scholars across many disciplines. In 2006, she moved to New York and applied for a tenured position at Barnard; it was widely assumed, given her sterling reputation, that her acceptance would be automatic — until an Israeli settler in the West Bank started an online petition demanding that she be denied tenure due to her 2002 book about Israel.

That online petition led to an incredibly ugly attempt to smear her as an anti-Semite who used shoddy scholarship to question Israeli claims, and — needless to say — Weiss was a vocal supporter of this effort. Pretending that she was concerned about Abu El-Haj’s academic abilities rather than her views on Israel — as though Weiss were even remotely capable of assessing Abu El-Haj’s anthropological and archeological methods — Weiss wrote an article in Haaretz arguing that the fight over Abu El-Haj’s tenure “is not just another round between the Zionists and the anti-Zionists,” but instead, “is about the nature of truth, and the possibility of, well, facts themselves.”

For someone who purports to be such a devoted adherent to pluralism and free expression on college campuses, Weiss sure does have a tendency to find a large number of Arab and Muslim scholars who are critical of Israel who she believes deserve sanction, vilification, punishment, and denial of career advancement.

I’m someone who strongly believes in the right of people to change their views and to evolve. My first book, which began by describing my own political and intellectual journey, started with this quote from Abraham Lincoln: “I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.” And I find some of the concerns about prevailing viewpoint intolerance on college campuses to be valid, or at least reasonable.

If Weiss would acknowledge that she spent years engaged in the precise types of censorship and vilification campaigns that she has now come to regard as so menacing, I would find that admission admirable, not objectionable. But she’s doing the opposite: She’s denying that her activities were geared toward exactly the climate of intimidation and censorship against which she now crusades. Perhaps it’s possible that she’s just in a state of denial, incapable of admitting that she built her career based on exactly the types of activities that she now so vocally denounces.

But what seems far more likely is that, like so many people, Weiss finds censorship and vilification objectionable only when it’s directed at her, her friends, and the viewpoints she supports. In particular, it is this mentality that explains why left-wing attacks on racism, fascism, and other authoritarian views on campus receive so much attention from America’s pundit class, while the most pervasive form of campus censorship — directed at Israel critics and pro-Palestinian activists — is so often ignored. In Bari Weiss, the New York Times seems to have found the perfect embodiment of this free speech double standard. But none of that should justify allowing a New York Times columnist and editor to offer such blatantly inaccurate claims about ugly controversies in which they played a leading role.

Top photo: Bari Weiss, left, a sophomore at Columbia Univerity, speaks at a press conference organized by Columbians for Academic Freedom as a crowd listens outside the gates to Columbia University in New York, Thursday, March 31, 2005.

The post NYT’s Bari Weiss Falsely Denies Her Years of Attacks on the Academic Freedom of Arab Scholars Who Criticize Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

The claim that Russian meddling in the election is “an act of war” comparable to these events isn’t brand new. Senators from both parties, such as Republican John McCain and Democrat Jeanne Shaheen, have long described Russian meddling in 2016 as an “act of war.” Hillary Clinton, while promoting her book last October, described Russia’s alleged hacking of the DNC and John Podesta’s email inbox as a “cyber 9/11.” And last February, the always war-hungry Tom Friedman of the New York Times said on “Morning Joe” that Russian hacking “was a 9/11-scale event. They attacked the core of our democracy. That was a Pearl Harbor-scale event.”

But the last few days have ushered in an explosion of this rhetoric from politicians and journalists alike. On Friday night’s Chris Hayes show on MSNBC, two separate guests — Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler and longtime Clinton aide Philippe Reines — posited Pearl Harbor as the “equivalent” of Russian meddling, provoking a shocked reaction from Hayes:

The Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty, complaining about President Donald Trump’s inaction, asked readers to “imagine how history would have judged Franklin D. Roosevelt in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, if he had taken to the radio airwaves to declare that Tokyo was ‘laughing their asses off.’ Or if George W. Bush had stood in the rubble of the World Trade Center with a bullhorn and launched a name-calling tirade against the Democrats.”

David “Axis of Evil” Frum went back a century earlier to write that Trump’s inaction amounts to “a dereliction of duty as grave as any since President Buchanan looked the other way as Southern state governments pillaged federal arsenals on the eve of the Civil War.” Podesta — who served as Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, as well as Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign chair — called Trump a “draft dodger” for failing to engage what he called this “war” with Russia.

Let’s leave aside what a stinging indictment this claim is of the Obama presidency. It not only means that Barack Obama allowed an attack of the magnitude of Pearl Harbor and 9/11 to happen on his watch, but worse, did very little — basically nothing — in response, allegedly due to fears that any retaliation would be criticized by Republicans as partisan. But for those who really believe this rhetoric, can fears of political attacks really justify inaction by the commander-in-chief — whose primary duty, we’re so often told, is to protect the nation — in the face of a Pearl Harbor or a 9/11? To posit this equivalence is to condemn Obama in the harshest possible terms, to accuse him of utter malfeasance in protecting the nation.

But the more important question is the one these chest-beating politicians and pundits notably refrain from addressing. If Russian election meddling is on par with the Pearl Harbor and 9/11 attacks, then should the U.S. response be on par with its response to those attacks? Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor prompted U.S. involvement in a world war and, ultimately, dropping two nuclear bombs on Japan; 9/11 initiated wars in multiple countries that still, 17 years later, have no end in sight, along with a systematic and still-worsening erosion of basic civil liberties.

This has been a long-standing tactic during the war on terror of neoconservatives: They love to accuse everyone of being insufficiently “tough” or “aggressive” with whatever country they crave heightened tensions, but they never specify what greater “toughness” is needed, because to do so would expose their extremism. Indeed, for years, GOP hawks such as John McCain, Marco Rubio, and Jeb Bush often accused Obama — who repeatedly tried to accommodate and even partner with Russian President Vladimir Putin — of being insufficiently “tough” on the Russians, of being too “weak” to “stand up” to the Russian leader, without specifying what they wanted him to do beyond arming Ukrainians. Regarding Obama’s alleged weakness toward Putin, McCain said in 2014 that “history will judge this administration incredibly harshly.”

The only specific proposal one hears now when it comes to responding to Russian meddling is a call for “sanctions.” But if one really believes that Russia’s actions amount to Pearl Harbor or 9/11, then sanctions seem like a very lame — indeed, a woefully inadequate — response. To borrow their rhetoric, imagine if Roosevelt had confined his response to Pearl Harbor to sanctions on Japanese leaders, or if Bush had announced sanctions on Al Qaeda as his sole response to 9/11. If you really believe this rhetoric, then you must support retaliation beyond mere sanctions.

Indeed, Obama imposed sanctions on Russia for years, but critics like McCain insisted that it had no hope of changing Putin’s behavior, let alone imposing any real punishment. “The only thing that will dissuade Vladimir Putin from what he is doing is when coffins come back to the families in Russia,” McCain said of Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

At least McCain, for all his faults, is following his rhetoric through to its logical conclusions. If you really believe that Putin attacked the U.S. on a level even close to what was done at Pearl Harbor or on 9/11, then of course you’d be arguing for retaliation far greater than sanctions; you’d be arguing for military action such as arming Russia’s enemies if not beyond that, as McCain has done. You’d also be furious with Obama for allowing it to happen on his watch and then doing so little in response, as McCain is:

All of this underscores the serious dangers many have pointed to for more than a year about why all this unhinged rhetoric is so alarming. If you really believe that Russia — with some phishing links sent to Podesta and some fake Facebook ads and Twitter bots — committed an “act of war” of any kind, let alone one on par with Pearl Harbor and 9/11, then it’s inevitable that extreme retaliatory measures will be considered and likely triggered. How does one justify a mere imposition of sanctions in the face of an attack similar to Pearl Harbor or 9/11? Doesn’t it stand to reason that something much more belligerent, enduring, and destructive would be necessary?

At the very least, no politician or pundit should be able to get away with issuing rhetoric of this type without being required to specify what they think ought to be done. Here, for instance, is “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd, doing his best 2002 impression of Bill Kristol, decreeing in a predictably viral tweet that all patriotic Americans are duty-bound to focus on the question of what we should do to “punish Russia”:

If you work in American politics or in the Gov’t on any level and your first reaction to today’s Mueller indictment is NOT ”how are we going to prevent this from happening again and how are we going to punish Russia,” then you need to rethink your priorities as a citizen.

— Chuck Todd (@chucktodd) February 16, 2018

Note, though, that Todd himself neglects to specify what “punishment” he advocates. This is reckless rhetoric of the most irresponsible kind: demanding that everyone agree that “punishment” toward Russia is warranted (upon pain of being found guilty of bad citizenship), while failing to specify what punishment would be just, warranted, and rational. To do that is to deliberately beat the drums of war, cultivate an atmosphere of belligerence and aggression, without any limits or notions of proportionality.

That’s exactly what is being done by those who keep declaring the U.S. to be “at war” with Russia, and especially those who invoke the worst attacks in U.S. history when doing so, all while refusing to state what they think should be done in response. It’s simultaneous reckless and cowardly.

Top photo: Russian President Vladimir Putin enters a hall before a meeting of the Victory Organizing Committee at the Kremlin in Moscow on March 17, 2015.

The post A Consensus Emerges: Russia Committed an “Act of War” on Par With Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Should the U.S. Response Be Similar? appeared first on The Intercept.

What’s wrong with Tribe’s claims? Everything. To begin with, Millian was not on that plane. The official list of victims includes nobody with that name; as the Daily Beast’s Marlow Stern pointed out, the claim that Millian was on the plane was a simple hoax from the internet sewer, 4chan. Tribe apparently saw someone making this claim somewhere on the internet and then, without bothering to check if it was actually true, told his 289,000 followers that it was true, and then constructed a rabid, deranged conspiracy theory around it.

After dozens, if not hundreds, of people told him that what he said was false, Tribe — after more than 2,000 people retweeted it — posted a mealy-mouthed follow-up noting that he can’t “vouch” for the accuracy of the “plenty of reporting” he saw claiming this was true: “reporting” that he still has not identified.

Even if Millian had been on the plane, casually suggesting that Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, or some combination of other villains purposely murdered everyone on the plane in order to silence one witness is deranged to the point of being a clinical pathology. That sort of baseless conspiracy-mongering ought to disqualify anyone from serious company for a long time.

But it almost certainly will have no effect on Tribe’s standing. As BuzzFeed’s Joseph Bernstein documented almost a year ago, Tribe has become one of the internet’s most unhinged cranks, churning out wild conspiracy theories and, in the process, becoming a social media star and MSNBC favorite. Among his lowlights was his promoting of a story from the well-known liberal “fake news” site Palmer Report claiming that Trump paid $10 million to former GOP Rep. Jason Chaffetz.

Tribe was also one of the people most responsible for building the platform of Louise Mensch who — among other things — has claimed that Putin murdered Andrew Breitbart and engineered the Ferguson protests.

I’ll confess some personal disappointment with all of this, given that — as a law student and then a young lawyer wanting to practice constitutional law — Tribe was someone I had regarded with a great deal of admiration. He was a genuine scholar of constitutional law. But like so many people in the public arena, the combination of Trump’s 2016 victory and the fearmongering specter of Putin as an omnipotent mastermind seems to have broken his brain, or at least the part of it responsible for rational reasoning.

The more deranged he gets, the more Tribe — needless to say — becomes not just a social media star (his Twitter follower count, like most Russia-Trump conspiracists, has exploded over the last year), but has also become an MSNBC favorite, as they exploit his credentials and pedigree to depict his madness as some sort of insightful, investigative dot-connecting.

That’s because, as I documented this morning, false claims about Russia are now a routine part of the U.S. media diet. There has long been a fringe on the far right that believes the Clintons are responsible for murdering dozens of people in order to silence them. Sometimes, people who thought that way were in the mainstream, as evidenced by the leading role played by the Wall Street Journal editorial page in pushing the theory that Hillary Clinton had former White House attorney Vince Foster murdered.

But those people have been largely scorned and relegated to obscurity. The new conspiracy theorists — the ones who casually suggest that when a plane crashes, it is really a secret attempt by Putin and Trump to silence one of the passengers (who wasn’t even a passenger) — are found not on far right websites, but on MSNBC and at Harvard Law School, with constantly growing social media followings and increasingly viral tweets. The people who like to rail most about the dangers of “fake news” and conspiracy theorizing seem awfully uninterested in condemning them because their derangement is for the right cause.

The post Harvard’s Laurence Tribe Has Become a Deranged Russia Conspiracist: Today Was His Most Humiliating Debacle appeared first on The Intercept.

The lack of any 9/11-type catastrophic attack on U.S. (or any Western) soil for the past 17 years, along with the killing of a pitifully aged, ailing bin Laden and the erosion of ISIS, has severely compromised their ongoing viability as major bad guys. So now — just as a film studio revitalizes a once-successful super-villain franchise for a new generation of moviegoers — we’re back to the Russians occupying center stage.

That Barack Obama spent eight years (including up through his final year-end news conference) mocking the notion that Russia posed a serious threat to the U.S. given their size and capabilities, and that he even tried repeatedly to accommodate and partner with Russian President Vladimir Putin, is of no concern: In the internet age, “2016” is regarded as ancient history, drowned out by an endless array of new threats pinned by a united media on the Russkie Plague. Moreover, human nature craves a belief in an existential foreign threat because it confers a sense of purpose and cause, strengthens tribal unity and identity, permits scapegoating, shifts blame for maladies from internal to external causes, and (like religion) offers a simplifying theory for understanding a complex world.

One of the prime accusations sustaining this script is that the Kremlin is drowning the West in “fake news” and other forms of propaganda. One can debate its impact and magnitude, but disinformation campaigns are something the U.S., Russia, and countless other nations have done to one another for centuries, and there is convincing evidence that Russia does this sort of thing now. But evidence of one threat does not mean that all claimed threats are real, nor does it mean that that tactic is exclusively wielded by one side.

Over the past year, there have been numerous claims made by Western intelligence agencies, mindlessly accepted as true in the Western press, that have turned out to be baseless, if not deliberate scams. Just today, it was revealed that Dutch Foreign Minister Halbe Zijlstra lied when he claimed he was at a meeting with Putin, in which the Russian president “said he considered Belarus, Ukraine and the Baltic states as part of a ‘Greater Russia.'”

“Fake news” is certainly something to worry about when it emanates from foreign adversaries, but it is at least as concerning and threatening, if not more so, when emanating from one’s own governments and media. And there are countless, highly significant examples beyond today’s of such propaganda that emanates from within.

Russian Interference in Brexit Vote

The Guardian, January 10, 2018:

Reuters, February 8, 2018:

Russians Responsible for #ReleaseTheMemo Campaign

Associated Press, January 22, 2018:

Daily Beast, January 23, 2018:

Russian Interference in German Elections

Reuters, July 4, 2017:

New York Times, September 21, 2017:

Russians Hacked Macron Campaign:

Telegraph, May 6, 2017:

Associated Press, June 1, 2017:

And this is all independent of all those cases when the U.S. media was forced to retract, or issue humiliating editor’s notes, about stories regarding the “Russian threat” that turned out to be false. Even in those cases in which some evidence can be found suggesting that some “Russians” were engaged online in support for a particular cause, the size and impact of it is usually so minute as to be laughable. In response to months of demands and threats to Twitter from the U.K. government to investigate how its service was used by Russians to support the Brexit referendum, Twitter — to satisfy mounting complaints — finally came up with this:

For the six decades of the miserable Cold War, those Americans who tried to argue that the Russian threat was being exaggerated for nefarious ends and who advocated for better relations between Washington and Moscow were branded as “traitors,” Kremlin apologists, or at best, “useful idiots.” The revitalization of Russia as prime villain has also given new life to those old right-wing tactics, though this time wielded by the same people who were once its targets:

But the reason this matters so much — this coordinated devotion to once again depicting Russia as a grave threat — is because of the serious, enduring policy implications. New Democratic Party star Joseph Kennedy III is following in the footsteps of his Cold Warrior ancestors by proposing massive new military, propaganda, and cybersecurity programs to combat the Russian threat. Senators such as Democrat Jeanne Shaheen and Republican John McCain routinely refer to “acts of war” when discussing U.S.-Russia relations. British generals and tabloids are hyping the Russian threat beyond all measure of reason in their quest to obtain new weapons systems and increased military spending at the expense of austerity-battered British subjects.

If there’s any lesson that should unite everyone in the West, it’s that the greatest skepticism is required when it comes to government and media claims about the nature of foreign threats. If we’re going to rejuvenate a Cold War, or submit to greater military spending and government powers in the name of stopping alleged Russian aggression, we should at least ensure that the information on which those campaigns succeed are grounded in fact. Even a casual review of the propaganda spewing forth from Western power centers over the last year leaves little doubt that the exact opposite is happening.

Top photo: The Dutch minister of foreign affairs Halbe Zijlstra speaks during a joint press conference with the German minister of foreign affairs Sigmar Gabriel at the ministry of foreign affairs in Berlin, Germany, 16 November 2017.

The post Dutch Official Admits Lying About Meeting With Putin: Is Fake News Used by Russia or About Russia? appeared first on The Intercept.

What caused this outburst of civil libertarianism was the implementation at airports by the Transportation Security Administration of new, invasive body-scanning machines that generated quasi-nude images or, if one refused that, physical pat-downs that included the groin area. Unlike far more egregious abuses that Americans largely ignored, if not sanctioned — from putting people in cages in the middle of an ocean for years without any trials to torturing helpless detainees convicted of no crimes to targeting even American citizens for assassination with no due process — these invasive procedures were being applied not just to Muslims, but also to Americans generally of all types. As a result, the TSA machines and pat-downs transformed huge numbers of people into newfound privacy and civil liberties advocates because the rights that they felt were being assaulted weren’t just those of Muslims and foreigners, but their own rights and those of people like them.

The lesson civil libertarians learned from that episode is that many Americans will remain blissfully ignorant, if not aggressively supportive, of even the most extreme rights abuses — unless they believe that they themselves or people who look like them will be affected, in which case they will become highly agitated in defense of the very same rights that they are more than happy to watch be eroded when the victims are other people. Two widely discussed controversies from this week illustrate this principle quite vividly.

The first is a long-anticipated essay in Harper’s about the #MeToo movement by Katie Roiphe, a longtime critic of various aspects of contemporary feminism and one of the most polarizing writers on these issues. Roiphe’s essay expresses various forms of ambivalence and criticism about what she regards as the movement’s excesses. One of the targets of her criticism is the so-called Shitty Media Men list, a document that was widely circulated among journalists that purported to identify dozens of men in journalism who have allegedly engaged in abusive, assaultive, or otherwise “creepy” behavior toward women.

The objections voiced by Roiphe to this list are ones that have been expressed by many genuine supporters of the #MeToo movement: namely, the accusations it contains are unvetted and unverified; anyone can add accusations on the list while remaining completely anonymous; and because the list purportedly was intended never to be published (a claim Roiphe questions), those accused of misconduct may never know that they’ve been accused and, in all events, have no ability to challenge or dispute the accusations made against them, ones which could nonetheless severely harm their reputations or even destroy their careers. Roiphe’s objection to the list is, in essence, one of due process: It enables people to be punished with no evidence of guilt, no guarantor of reliability, nor any meaningful opportunity to contest the accusations.

In her attempt to induce readers to feel anger over this media list, Roiphe tries to imagine a hypothetical analogue that would be self-evidently infuriating and thus, invites readers to feel the same way about this list. She writes:

As amazing, or at least as horrifying, as it is, Roiphe seems completely unaware that the hypothetical list of dangerous “Muslims who might blow up planes” that she asks readers to fantasize exists does, in fact, already exist. It’s called the “no-fly list.” It’s a list compiled by the government in total secrecy, of people (almost entirely Muslims) who the government, with no notice or evidence or process, has decided are too dangerous to board airplanes. In other words, it’s “a secretly circulating, anonymously crowd-sourced list of Muslims who might blow up planes.”

Contrary to Roiphe’s implied claim that the existence of such a list would provoke the intense level of rage and fury she wishes were directed at the Shitty Media Men list, the no-fly list has existed for years and barely anyone has cared. I know this personally because I’ve written repeatedly about it: about American Muslim teenagers who show up at the ticket counter of an airport for a long-anticipated trip to Somalia to visit their grandparents and relatives for the first time only to suddenly learn, to their great humiliation, that their own government has secretly banished them from planes; or U.S. Air Force veterans who live abroad and are barred from visiting their dying mothers for the same reason; or American Muslims detained in Kuwait without charges who can’t be released because the U.S. government secretly declared them unfit to fly. The American Civil Liberties Union has repeatedly sued the government, arguing that these lists are an unconstitutional violation of due process, and have often lost.

Roiphe ignored these controversies because, it seems, the victims of these anonymous, due-process-free lists were just black Muslims. She’s become incensed with due process deprivations only now when those being punished — to a far lesser extent than those on the no-fly list — are her white media friends and those who look like her and come from similar backgrounds. Her “hypothetical” example that, in fact, has existed for years reveals that she literally had no idea about these far more extreme rights abuses, and her belief that such a list would provoke rage if it were aimed at Muslims — when the actual list provoked widespread indifference among Americans (including her) — demonstrates how insular and self-absorbed media elites are when deciding which rights infringements bother them and which do not.

Exactly the same dynamic is evident in a seemingly much different controversy: the one provoked by release of the Nunes memo, which claims that the Department of Justice and FBI abused its spying powers by concealing material evidence from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court in order to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on the communications of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. As a result of these assertions, people like Nunes and House Speaker Paul Ryan have spent the last week prancing around as fierce opponents of surveillance abuses and opaque warrant procedures.

But these are the very same people who have spent the last decade empowering, cheering, and enabling exactly these same abuses when they have been directed at Muslim-Americans. Just as is true of Roiphe and those cheering her essay, these Republican authoritarians only care now because the supposed victim is someone who is like them, someone with whom they identify.

Indeed, civil libertarians have spent the last two decades vehemently objecting that the FISA court is a joke, that it rubber-stamps anything the DOJ and FBI want, and that Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act allows massive, warrantless eavesdropping on Americans. Back in 2014, The Intercept, using Snowden documents, revealed (with their consent) the names of five prominent Muslim-Americans who had been targeted by the National Security Agency and/or FBI for invasive surveillance for reasons that were almost certainly political.

Not only did people like Devin Nunes and Paul Ryan never care about any of those abuses — far worse, they actively supported and empowered those abuses. Indeed, just three weeks ago, Nunes and Ryan joined with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, to increase the domestic spying powers of the Trump FBI and NSA while blocking all reforms and safeguards. That’s because — unlike consistent defenders of free speech (ACLU and FIRE) and consistent defenders of privacy and due process (Russ Feingold and Justin Amash), these charlatans are more than happy for these abuses to occur as long as those subjected to them are Muslim-Americans or people who, for whatever reasons, are powerless in Washington.

This is one of the most toxic pathologies of America’s ruling class: They are utterly indifferent to the suffering and victimization of the rights and civil liberties of people who are unlike them and distant from them. But as soon as far more benign erosions affect them and those like them, they become shrilly and selfishly outraged.

That’s the dynamic that caused the former ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Jane Harman, to spend years vigorously defending warrantless NSA spying under George W. Bush, only to turn into an overnight privacy fanatic when she learned that her own conversations, in which she was plotting with a suspected agent of the Israeli government, had been eavesdropped on by the FBI. It’s why Jonathan Chait writes tens of thousands of words railing against “PC culture” and “the intolerant left” when his friend Hanna Rosin, a professional writer, is criticized, but stays almost entirely silent when far more severe and pervasive censorship — aimed at Israel critics — takes root on American campuses and other institutions. It’s why Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein spent decades as one of the most devoted CIA and NSA loyalists — until she learned she had been spied on by the CIA during her torture investigation, when she suddenly discovered the need for safeguards and privacy protections. As the consistent rights crusader Radley Balko put it recently:

Pearl clutching over alleged misleading info on the Page warrant applications reminds me of gasps over the no-knock raid on Manafort. When the political class gets the tiniest taste of injustices inflicted on regular people daily, they make themselves into Mandelas.

If these self-centered outbursts of anger and offense actually engendered an enduring, generalized commitment to the need to safeguard these rights — not just when they affect elites and their friends, but people generally — then one could at least find some value in these episodes even while remaining repulsed at the unprincipled self-centeredness that fosters them. But that almost never what happens.

Instead, people like Roiphe, Nunes, and the rest are not really animated by any principles that can endure or find general application. They’re just motivated by personalized grievance on behalf of themselves and their socioeconomic cohorts. As a result, these episodes produce little beyond special pleading, petulant self-victimization, and the perpetuation of a framework that holds that only elites truly deserve due process rights and core civil liberties protections.

Top photo: Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, answer questions at the U.S. Capitol during a press conference March 2, 2017 in Washington, DC.

The post The Nunes Memo and Katie Roiphe Article Show How Concerns for Due Process and Civil Liberties Are Highly Selective and Self-Centered appeared first on The Intercept.

The spectacle began Friday morning at 11 a.m. EST, when the Most Trusted Name in News spent 12 straight minutes on air flamboyantly hyping an exclusive bombshell report that seemed to prove that WikiLeaks, last September, had secretly offered the Trump campaign, even Donald Trump himself, special access to the Democratic National Committee emails before they were published on the internet. As CNN sees the world, this would prove collusion between the Trump family and WikiLeaks and, more importantly, between Trump and Russia, since the U.S. intelligence community regards WikiLeaks as an “arm of Russian intelligence,” and therefore, so does the U.S. media.

This entire revelation was based on an email that CNN strongly implied it had exclusively obtained and had in its possession. The email was sent by someone named “Michael J. Erickson” — someone nobody had heard of previously and whom CNN could not identify — to Donald Trump Jr., offering a decryption key and access to DNC emails that WikiLeaks had “uploaded.” The email was a smoking gun, in CNN’s extremely excited mind, because it was dated September 4 — 10 days before WikiLeaks began promoting access to those emails online — and thus proved that the Trump family was being offered special, unique access to the DNC archive: likely by WikiLeaks and the Kremlin.

It’s impossible to convey with words what a spectacularly devastating scoop CNN believed it had, so it’s necessary to watch it for yourself to see the tone of excitement, breathlessness, and gravity the network conveyed as they clearly believed they were delivering a near-fatal blow on the Trump-Russia collusion story:

There was just one small problem with this story: It was fundamentally false, in the most embarrassing way possible. Hours after CNN broadcast its story — and then hyped it over and over and over — the Washington Post reported that CNN got the key fact of the story wrong.

The email was not dated September 4, as CNN claimed, but rather September 14 — which means it was sent after WikiLeaks had already published access to the DNC emails online. Thus, rather than offering some sort of special access to Trump, “Michael J. Erickson” was simply some random person from the public encouraging the Trump family to look at the publicly available DNC emails that WikiLeaks — as everyone by then already knew — had publicly promoted. In other words, the email was the exact opposite of what CNN presented it as being.

How did CNN end up aggressively hyping such a spectacularly false story? They refuse to say. Many hours after their story got exposed as false, the journalist who originally presented it, congressional reporter Manu Raju, finally posted a tweet noting the correction. CNN’s P.R. department then claimed that “multiple sources” had provided CNN with the false date. And Raju went on CNN, in muted tones, to note the correction, explicitly claiming that “two sources” had each given him the false date on the email, while also making clear that CNN did not ever even see the email, but only had sources describe its purported contents:

All of this prompts the glaring, obvious, and critical question — one that CNN refuses to address: How did “multiple sources” all misread the date on this document, in exactly the same way and toward the same end, and then feed this false information to CNN?

It is, of course, completely plausible that one source might innocently misread a date on a document. But how is it remotely plausible that multiple sources could all innocently and in good faith misread the date in exactly the same way, all to cause the dissemination of a blockbuster revelation about Trump-Russia-WikiLeaks collusion? This is the critical question that CNN simply refuses to answer. In other words, CNN refuses to provide the most minimal transparency to enable the public to understand what happened here.

Why does this matter so much? For so many significant reasons:

To begin with, it’s hard to overstate how fast, far, and wide this false story traveled. Democratic Party pundits, operatives, and journalists with huge social media platforms predictably jumped on the story immediately, announcing that it proved collusion between Trump and Russia (through WikiLeaks). One tweet from Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu, claiming that this proved evidence of criminal collusion, was retweeted thousands and thousands of times in just a few hours (Lieu quietly deleted the tweet after I noted its falsity, and long after it went very viral, without ever telling his followers that the CNN story, and therefore his accusation, had been debunked).

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/939229011066179584

Brookings Institution’s Benjamin Wittes, whose star has risen as he has promoted himself as a friend of former FBI Director Jim Comey, not only promoted the CNN story in the morning, but did so with the word “boom” — which he uses to signal that a major blow has been delivered to Trump on the Russia story — along with a GIF of a cannon being detonated:

https://twitter.com/benjaminwittes/status/939120454450794496

Incredibly, to this very moment — almost 24 hours after CNN’s story was debunked — Wittes has never noted to his more than 200,000 followers that the story he so excitedly promoted turned out to be utterly false, even though he returned to Twitter long after the story was debunked to tweet about other matters. He just left his false and inflammatory claims uncorrected.

Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall believed the story was so significant that he used an image of an atomic bomb detonating at the top of his article discussing its implications, an article he tweeted to his roughly 250,000 followers. Only at night was an editor’s note finally added noting that the whole thing was false.

It’s hard to quantify exactly how many people were deceived — filled with false news and propaganda — by the CNN story. But thanks to Democratic-loyal journalists and operatives who decree every Trump-Russia claim to be true without seeing any evidence, it’s certainly safe to say that many hundreds of thousands of people, almost certainly millions, were exposed to these false claims.

Surely anyone who has any minimal concerns about journalistic accuracy — which would presumably include all the people who have spent the last year lamenting Fake News, propaganda, Twitter bots, and the like — would demand an accounting as to how a major U.S. media outlet ended up filling so many people’s brains with totally false news. That alone should prompt demands from CNN for an explanation about what happened here. No Russian Facebook ad or Twitter bot could possibly have anywhere near the impact as this CNN story had when it comes to deceiving people with blatantly inaccurate information.

Second, the “multiple sources” who fed CNN this false information did not confine themselves to that network. They were apparently very busy eagerly spreading the false information to as many media outlets as they could find. In the middle of the day, CBS News claimed that it had independently “confirmed” CNN’s story about the email and published its own breathless article discussing the grave implications of this discovered collusion.

Most embarrassing of all was what MSNBC did. You just have to watch this report from its “intelligence and national security correspondent” Ken Dilanian to believe it. Like CBS, Dilanian also claimed that he had independently “confirmed” the false CNN report from “two sources with direct knowledge of this.” Dilanian, whose career in the U.S. media continues to flourish the more he is exposed as someone who faithfully parrots what the CIA tells him to say (since that is one of the most coveted and valued attributes in U.S. journalism), spent three minutes mixing evidence-free CIA claims as fact with totally false assertions about what his multiple “sources with direct knowledge” told him about all this. Please watch this — again, not just the content but the tenor and tone of how they “report” — as it is Baghdad Bob-level embarrassing:

Think about what this means. It means that at least two — and possibly more — sources, which these media outlets all assessed as credible in terms of having access to sensitive information, all fed the same false information to multiple news outlets at the same time. For multiple reasons, the probability is very high that these sources were Democratic members of the House Intelligence Committee (or their high-level staff members), which is the committee that obtained access to Trump Jr.’s emails, although it’s certainly possible that it’s someone else. We won’t know until these news outlets deign to report this crucial information to the public: Which “multiple sources” acted jointly to disseminate incredibly inflammatory, false information to the nation’s largest news outlets?

Just last week, the Washington Post decided — to great applause (including mine) — to expose a source to whom they had promised anonymity and off-the-record protections because they discovered that she was purposely feeding them false information as part of a scheme by Project Veritas to discredit the Post. It’s a well-established principle of journalism — one that is rarely followed when it comes to powerful people in D.C. — that journalists should expose, rather than protect and conceal, sources who purposely feed them false information to be disseminated to the public.

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/935264430501310466

Is that what happened here? Did these “multiple sources” who fed not just CNN, but also MSNBC and CBS completely false information do so deliberately and in bad faith? Until these news outlets provide an accounting of what happened — what one might call “minimal journalistic transparency” — it’s impossible to say for certain. But right now, it’s very difficult to imagine a scenario in which multiple sources all fed the wrong date to multiple media outlets innocently and in good faith.

If this were, in fact, a deliberate attempt to cause a false and highly inflammatory story to be reported, then these media outlets have an obligation to expose who the culprits are — just as the Washington Post did last week to the woman making false claims about Roy Moore (it was much easier in that case because the source they exposed was a nobody in D.C., rather than someone on whom they rely for a steady stream of stories, the way CNN and MSNBC rely on Democratic members of the Intelligence Committee). By contrast, if this were just an innocent mistake, then these media outlets should explain how such an implausible sequence of events could possibly have happened.

Thus far, these media corporations are doing the opposite of what journalists ought to do: Rather than informing the public about what happened and providing minimal transparency and accountability for themselves and the high-level officials who caused this to happen, they are hiding behind meaningless, obfuscating statements crafted by P.R. executives and lawyers.

How can journalists and news outlets so flamboyantly act offended when they’re attacked as being “Fake News” when this is the conduct behind which they hide when they get caught disseminating incredibly consequential false stories?

The more serious you think the Trump-Russia story is, the more dangerous you think it is when Trump attacks the U.S. media as “Fake News,” the more you should be disturbed by what happened here, the more transparency and accountability you should be demanding. If you’re someone who thinks Trump’s attacks on the media are dangerous, then you should be first in line objecting when they act recklessly and demand transparency and accountability from them. It is debacles like this — and the subsequent corporate efforts to obfuscate — that have made the U.S. media so disliked and that fuel and empower Trump’s attacks on them.

Third, this type of recklessness and falsity is now a clear and highly disturbing trend — one could say a constant — when it comes to reporting on Trump, Russia, and WikiLeaks. I have spent a good part of the last year documenting the extraordinarily numerous, consequential, and reckless stories that have been published — and then corrected, rescinded, and retracted — by major media outlets when it comes to this story.

All media outlets, of course, will make mistakes. The Intercept certainly has made our share, as have all outlets. And it’s particularly natural, inevitable, for mistakes to be made on a highly complicated, opaque story like the question of the relationship between Trump and the Russians, and questions relating to how WikiLeaks obtained the DNC and Podesta emails. That is all to be expected.

But what one should expect with journalistic “mistakes” is that they sometimes go in one direction and other times go in the other direction. That’s exactly what has not happened here. Virtually every false story published goes only in one direction: to be as inflammatory and damaging as possible on the Trump-Russia story and about Russia particularly. At some point, once “mistakes” all start going in the same direction, toward advancing the same agenda, they cease looking like mistakes.

No matter your views on those political controversies, no matter how much you hate Trump or regard Russia as a grave villain and threat to our cherished democracy and freedoms, it has to be acknowledged that when the U.S. media is spewing constant false news about all of this, that, too, is a grave threat to our democracy and cherished freedom.

So numerous are the false stories about Russia and Trump over the last year that I literally cannot list them all. Just consider the ones from the last week alone, as enumerated by the New York Times yesterday in its news report on CNN’s embarrassment:

It was also yet another prominent reporting error at a time when news organizations are confronting a skeptical public, and a president who delights in attacking the media as “fake news.”

Last Saturday, ABC News suspended a star reporter, Brian Ross, after an inaccurate report that Donald Trump had instructed Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser, to contact Russian officials during the presidential race.

The report fueled theories about coordination between the Trump campaign and a foreign power, and stocks dropped after the news. In fact, Mr. Trump’s instruction to Mr. Flynn came after he was president-elect.

Several news outlets, including Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal, also inaccurately reported this week that Deutsche Bank had received a subpoena from the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, for President Trump’s financial records.

The president and his circle have not been shy about pointing out the errors.

That’s just the last week alone. Let’s just remind ourselves of how many times major media outlets have made humiliating, breathtaking errors on the Trump-Russia story, always in the same direction, toward the same political goals. Here is just a sample of incredibly inflammatory claims that traveled all over the internet before having to be corrected, walked back, or retracted — often long after the initial false claims spread, and where the corrections receive only a tiny fraction of the attention with which the initial false stories are lavished:

• Russia hacked into the U.S. electric grid to deprive Americans of heat during winter (Wash Post)
• An anonymous group (PropOrNot) documented how major U.S. political sites are Kremlin agents (Wash Post)
• WikiLeaks has a long, documented relationship with Putin (Guardian)
• A secret server between Trump and a Russian bank has been discovered (Slate)
• RT hacked C-SPAN and caused disruption in its broadcast (Fortune)
• Russians hacked into a Ukrainian artillery app (Crowdstrike)
• Russians attempted to hack elections systems in 21 states (multiple news outlets, echoing Homeland Security)
• Links have been found between Trump ally Anthony Scaramucci and a Russian investment fund under investigation (CNN)

That really is just a small sample. So continually awful and misleading has this reporting been that even Vladimir Putin’s most devoted critics — such as Russian expatriate Masha Gessen, oppositional Russian journalists, and anti-Kremlin liberal activists in Moscow — are constantly warning that the U.S. media’s unhinged, ignorant, paranoid reporting on Russia is harming their cause in all sorts of ways, in the process destroying the credibility of the U.S. media in the eyes of Putin’s opposition (who — unlike Americans who have been fed a steady news and entertainment propaganda diet for decades about Russia — actually understand the realities of that country).

U.S. media outlets are very good at demanding respect. They love to imply, if not outright state, that being patriotic and a good American means that one must reject efforts to discredit them and their reporting because that’s how one defends press freedom.

But journalists also have the responsibility not just to demand respect and credibility but to earn it. That means that there shouldn’t be such a long list of abject humiliations, in which completely false stories are published to plaudits, traffic, and other rewards, only to fall apart upon minimal scrutiny. It certainly means that all of these “errors” shouldn’t be pointing in the same direction, pushing the same political outcome or journalistic conclusion.

But what it means most of all is that when media outlets are responsible for such grave and consequential errors as the spectacle we witnessed yesterday, they have to take responsibility for it by offering transparency and accountability. In this case, that can’t mean hiding behind P.R. and lawyer silence and waiting for this to just all blow away.

At minimum, these networks — CNN, MSNBC, and CBS — have to either identify who purposely fed them this blatantly false information or explain how it’s possible that “multiple sources” all got the same information wrong in innocence and good faith. Until they do that, their cries and protests the next time they’re attacked as “Fake News” should fall on deaf ears, since the real author of those attacks — the reason those attacks resonate — is themselves and their own conduct.

Update: Dec. 9, 2017
Hours after this article was published on Saturday — a full day and a half after his original tweets promoting the false CNN story with a “boom” and a cannon — Benjamin Wittes finally got around to noting that the CNN story he hyped has “serious problems”; needless to say, that acknowledgment received a fraction of retweets from his followers as his original tweets hyping the story attracted.

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The post The U.S. Media Suffered Its Most Humiliating Debacle in Ages and Now Refuses All Transparency Over What Happened appeared first on The Intercept.

The design of Twitter, where many political journalists spend their time, is in large part responsible for this damage. Its space constraints mean that tweeted headlines or tiny summaries of reporting are often assumed to be true with no critical analysis of their accuracy and are easily spread. Claims from journalists that people want to believe are shared like wildfire, while less popular subsequent corrections or nuanced debunking are easily ignored. Whatever one’s views are on the actual impact of Twitter Russian bots, surely the propensity of journalistic falsehoods to spread far and wide is at least as significant.

Just in the last week alone, there have been four major factually false claims that have gone viral because journalists on Twitter endorsed and spread them: three about the controversy involving Donna Brazile and the Democratic National Committee, and one about documents and emails published by WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign. It’s well worth examining them, both to document what the actual truth is, as well as to understand how often and easily this online journalistic misleading occurs.

Viral Falsehood #1

The Clinton/DNC agreement cited by Brazile only applied to the general election, not the primary.

On Wednesday, Politico published a blockbuster accusation from Brazile’s new book: that the DNC had “rigged” the 2016 primary election for Hillary Clinton through an agreement that gave Clinton control over key aspects of the DNC, a claim that Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., endorsed on CNN. The Clinton camp refused to comment publicly but instead contacted their favorite reporters to publish their response as news.

The following day, NBC published an article by Alex Seitz-Wald that recited and endorsed the Clinton camp’s primary defense: Brazile was wrong because the agreement in question (a copy of which they provided to Seitz-Wald) applied “only to preparations for the general election” and had nothing to do with the primary season. That defense, if true, would be fatal to Brazile’s claims, and so DNC-loyal journalists all over Twitter instantly declared it to be true, thus pronouncing Brazile’s accusation to have been fully debunked. This post documents how quickly this claim was endorsed on Twitter by journalists and Democratic operatives, and how far and wide it therefore spread.

The problem with this claim is that it is blatantly and obviously false. All one has to do to know this is read the agreement. Unlike the journalists spreading this DNC defense, Campaign Legal Center’s Brendan Fischer bothered to read it, and immediately saw and documented how obviously false this claim is:

The NBC article that was originally used to spread this claim now includes what amounts to a serious walk-back, if not outright retraction, of the DNC’s principal defense:

DNC and Clinton allies pointed to the fact that the agreement contained self-justifying lawyer language claiming that it is “focused exclusively on preparations for the General,” but, as Fischer noted, that passage “is contradicted by the rest of the agreement.” This would be like creating a contract to explicitly bribe an elected official (“A will pay Politician B to vote YES on Bill X”), then adding a throwaway paragraph with a legalistic disclaimer that “nothing in this agreement is intended to constitute a bribe,” and then have journalists cite that paragraph to proclaim that no bribe happened even though the agreement on its face explicitly says the opposite.

The Clinton/DNC agreement explicitly vested the Clinton campaign with control over key matters during the primary season: the exact opposite of what journalists on Twitter caused hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people to believe. Nonetheless, DNC-loyal commentators continue to cite headlines and tweets citing the legalistic language to convince huge numbers of people that the truth is the exact opposite of what it actually is:

Viral Falsehood #2

Sanders signed the same agreement with the DNC that Clinton did.

To make the Clinton/DNC agreement appear benign and normal, the claim was quickly and widely circulated that Bernie Sanders had also signed the same agreement with the DNC as Clinton had. This, too, was false — in the most fundamental way possible.

Simply put, the agreement Sanders signed with the DNC — which the Sanders camp appears to have provided ABC News in order to debunk the claim — did not contain any of the provisions vesting control over the DNC that made the Clinton agreement cited by Brazile so controversial. As ABC News put it (emphasis added):

A joint fundraising agreement between the Bernie Sanders campaign and the Democratic National Committee — obtained Friday by ABC News and signed at the start of the primary campaign for the 2016 presidential election — does not include any language about coordinating on strategic decisions over hiring or budget, unlike a fundraising memo between the Hillary Clinton team and the DNC.

It’s possible that had Sanders wanted to invoke his funding arrangement with the DNC, and then signed a second agreement, it might have included similar control provisions. But it’s also possible that it would not have. We’ll never know, because it never happened. What we actually know for certain — what exists in reality — is that Sanders never signed any agreement with the DNC that contained the control provisions that were given in 2015 to the Clinton campaign. In other words, the provisions cited by Brazile in her “rigging” allegation did not exist in any contract signed with the DNC by the Sanders campaign.

Needless to say, a tiny fraction of those who were exposed to the original falsehood (Sanders signed the same agreement as Clinton) ended up seeing this fundamental reversal, because the journalists who promoted the original falsehood felt no compunction, as usual, to provide the less pleasing correction.

Viral Falsehood #3

Brazile stupidly thought she could unilaterally remove Clinton as the nominee.

Yesterday, the Washington Post published an article reporting on various claims made in Brazile’s new book. The headline, which was widely tweeted, made it seem as though Brazile delusionally believed she had a power which, obviously, she did not in fact possess: “Donna Brazile: I considered replacing Clinton with Biden as 2016 Democratic nominee.” The article said Brazile considered exercising this power after Clinton’s fainting spell made her worry that Clinton was physically debilitated, and her campaign was “anemic” and had taken on “the odor of failure.”

Brazile — as a result of her stinging criticisms and accusations of Clinton, Obama, and the DNC — is currently Public Enemy No. 1 among Democrats in the media. So they seized on this headline to pretend that she claimed the power to unilaterally remove Clinton on a whim and then used this claim to mercilessly vilify her — the chair of Al Gore’s 2000 campaign, last year’s interim head of the DNC, and a long-time Democratic Party operative — as a deluded, insane, dishonest, profiteering, ignorant fabulist who lacks all credibility.

But the entire attack on Brazile was false. She did not claim, at least according to the Post article being cited, that she had the power to unilaterally remove Clinton. The original Post article, buried deep down in the article, well after the headline, made clear that she was referencing a complicated process in the DNC charter that allowed for removal of a nominee who had become incapacitated.

The Post then amended its story to reflect that she made no such absurd claim in her book, but rather noted that “the DNC charter empowered her to initiate replacement of the nominee” and that “if a nominee became disabled, she explains, the party chair would oversee a complicated process of filling the vacancy that would include a meeting of the full DNC.” The Post then added this note to the top of the article:

Journalists on Twitter spent hours yesterday mocking, maligning, and attacking the reputation of Brazile for a claim that she simply never made — all because a tweeted headline, which they never bothered to read past or evaluate, made them think they were justified in doing so in order to malign someone who has, quickly and bizarrely, become one of the Democrats’ primary enemies.

Viral Falsehood #4

Evidence has emerged proving that the content of WikiLeaks documents and emails was doctored. 

Last year, from the time WikiLeaks began publishing emails and documents from the DNC and John Podesta’s email inbox, Clinton officials and their media supporters have constantly insinuated, and sometimes outright stated, that the WikiLeaks documents were frauds because they had been altered. What was most notable about this accusation was how easily it would have been proven had it really been true. All anyone had to do was show the actual, original email that they sent or received, and then compare it to the altered WikiLeaks version, and that would have been proof that the WikiLeaks archive was unreliable.

But that never happened. Never once did any of the dozens of Democratic Party operatives who sent or received the emails published by WikiLeaks point to a single specific case of an alteration — something that, obviously, they would have eagerly done had they been able to. As Politico noted last year (emphasis added):

Clinton’s team hasn’t challenged the accuracy of even the most salacious emails released in the past four days, including those featuring aides making snarky references to Catholicism or a Bill Clinton protégé describing Chelsea Clinton as a “spoiled brat.” And numerous digital forensic firms told POLITICO that they haven’t seen any proof of tampering in the emails they’ve examined — adding that only the hacked Democrats themselves could offer that kind of conclusive evidence.

Similarly, when PolitiFact tried last year to fact-check the Clinton campaign’s claims that the documents were doctored, they noted: “The Clinton campaign, however, has yet to produce any evidence that any specific emails in the latest leak were fraudulent.”

Nonetheless, the desire to believe this persisted. And this week, Associated Press published a report that countless journalists seized upon to claim that proof finally had emerged that the WikiLeaks documents had been altered. The claim in the AP report is incredibly simple and limited. It does not involve any claim that WikiLeaks altered any documents, or that any of the emails it published were frauds; rather, the claim is that Guccifer, on one of the documents that he published, placed a “confidential” watermark that did not appear on another version:

The first document Guccifer 2.0 published on June 15 came not from the DNC as advertised but from Podesta’s inbox, according to a former DNC official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press.

The official said the word “CONFIDENTIAL” was not in the original document .

Guccifer 2.0 had airbrushed it to catch reporters’ attention.

There are so many reasons to question whether this actually happened. To begin with, the fact that one version of the document is without a “confidential” watermark doesn’t mean no version has one; it’s common to add watermarks of that sort for different purposes and different recipients. Moreover, AP’s only basis is an anonymous source claiming the document had been altered, along with the version that lacks the watermark. This is very far from proof that Guccifer “airbrushed it to catch reporters’ attention.”

But let’s assume for the sake of argument that Guccifer did, in fact, add a “confidential” watermark to this document to entice journalists to view the document as more appetizing. This does not remotely justify the claim that any of the documents and emails published by WikiLeaks were materially altered and were thus unreliable.

First, Guccifer adding a watermark to a document he circulated does not mean that any of the emails published by WikiLeaks in its archive was altered. It’s long been known that Guccifer altered the documents’ metadata to hide its path, but nobody ever tried to cite that as proof that anything published by WikiLeaks was fraudulent (indeed, PolitiFact cited Guccifer’s alteration of metadata when concluding there was no evidence that the WikiLeaks documents themselves had been altered).

Second, this has no bearing on the content of the emails or documents themselves published by WikiLeaks, which, to date, nobody has demonstrated have been altered in the slightest. Third, if it were the case that any of the emails or documents published by WikiLeaks were fraudulent, it would still be incredibly easy to prove: All anyone would have to do is produce the original and show how the WikiLeaks version was altered. Why — a full year after WikiLeaks began publishing these documents — has nobody done this, despite the overwhelming incentive that exists to expose this?

In sum, evidence that the content of any of the WikiLeaks emails was altered is nonexistent, while there is overwhelming reason to believe none has been (beginning with the fact that, as easy it would be to do so, no proof has been provided after all this time). Nonetheless, as a result of journalists’ conduct on Twitter this week, the false claim that emails and documents in the WikiLeaks archive were proven to be altered is now viral and will remain fixed in people’s belief system forever:

There’s no way to prove the negative, that no emails or documents published by WikiLeaks were altered. But one should demand actual evidence before affirming this claim. And despite the ease of providing that proof, and the long period of time that has elapsed, none has been provided. But, unsurprisingly, that did not stop the claim that it had been proven from going viral this week on Twitter — all based on the tenuous claim that Guccifer added a “confidential” watermark to one of the documents he circulated.

It can certainly be menacing for Russian bots to disseminate divisive messaging on Twitter. But it’s at least equally menacing if journalists with the loudest claim to authoritative credibility are using that platform constantly to entrench falsehoods in the public’s mind.

The post Four Viral Claims Spread by Journalists on Twitter in the Last Week Alone That Are False appeared first on The Intercept.

This official story was explosive for obvious reasons, and predictably triggered instant decrees – that of course went viral – declaring that the legitimacy of the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election is now in doubt.

Virginia’s Democratic Congressman Don Beyer, referring to the 21 targeted states, announced that this shows “Russia tried to hack their election”:

The same day @realDonaldTrump refers to "Russia Hoax," Homeland Security Dept. tells 21 states that Russia tried to hack their elections. https://t.co/X6UrqFMUTW

— Rep. Don Beyer (@RepDonBeyer) September 22, 2017

MSNBC’s Paul Revere for all matters relating to the Kremlin take-over, Rachel Maddow, was indignant that this wasn’t told to us earlier and that we still aren’t getting all the details. “What we have now figured out,” Maddow gravely intoned as she showed the multi-colored maps she made, is that “Homeland Security knew at least by June that 21 states had been targeted by Russian hackers during the election. . .targeting their election infrastructure.”

DHS didn't bother to tell the 21 states Russia tried to hack during the election until this afternoon. https://t.co/48CNZL8MBp

— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) September 23, 2017

They were one small step away from demanding that the election results be nullified, indulging the sentiment expressed by #Resistance icon Carl Reiner the other day: “Is there anything more exciting that [sic] the possibility of Trump’s election being invalidated & Hillary rightfully installed as our President?”

So what was wrong with this story? Just one small thing: it was false. The story began to fall apart yesterday when Associated Press reported that Wisconsin – one of the states included in the original report that, for obvious reasons, caused the most excitement – did not, in fact, have its election systems targeted by Russian hackers:

The spokesman for Homeland Security then tried to walk back that reversal, insisting that there was still evidence that some computer networks had been targeted, but could not say that they had anything to do with elections or voting. And, as AP noted: “Wisconsin’s chief elections administrator, Michael Haas, had repeatedly said that Homeland Security assured the state it had not been targeted.”

Then the story collapsed completely last night. The Secretary of State for another one of the named states, California, issued a scathing statement repudiating the claimed report:

Sometimes stories end up debunked. There’s nothing particularly shocking about that. If this were an isolated incident, one could chalk it up to basic human error that has no broader meaning.

But this is no isolated incident. Quite the contrary: this has happened over and over and over again. Inflammatory claims about Russia get mindlessly hyped by media outlets, almost always based on nothing more than evidence-free claims from government officials, only to collapse under the slightest scrutiny, because they are entirely lacking in evidence.

The examples of such debacles when it comes to claims about Russia are too numerous to comprehensively chronicle. I wrote about this phenomenon many times and listed many of the examples, the last time in June when 3 CNN journalists “resigned” over a completely false story linking Trump adviser Anthony Scaramucci to investigations into a Russian investment fund which the network was forced to retract:

Or that time when Slate claimed that Trump had created a secret server with a Russian bank, all based on evidence that every other media outlet which looked at it were too embarrassed to get near? Or the time the Guardian was forced to retract its report by Ben Jacobs – which went viral – that casually asserted that WikiLeaks has a long relationship with the Kremlin? Or the time that Fortune retracted suggestions that RT had hacked into and taken over C-SPAN’s network? And then there’s the huge market that was created – led by leading Democrats – that blindly ingested every conspiratorial, unhinged claim about Russia churned out by an army of crazed conspiracists such as Louise Mensch and Claude “TrueFactsStated” Taylor?

And now we have the Russia-hacked-the-voting-systems-of-21-states to add to this trash heap. Each time the stories go viral; each time they further shape the narrative; each time those who spread them say little to nothing when it is debunked.

None of this means that every Russia claim is false, nor does it disprove the accusation that Putin ordered the hacking of the DNC and John Podesta’s email inboxes (a claim for which, just by the way, still no evidence has been presented by the U.S. government). Perhaps there were some states that were targeted, even though the key claims of this story, that attracted the most attention, have now been repudiated.

But what it does demonstrate is that an incredibly reckless, anything-goes climate prevails when it comes to claims about Russia. Media outlets will publish literally any official assertion as Truth without the slightest regard for evidentiary standards.

Seeing Putin lurking behind and masterminding every western problem is now religious dogma – it explains otherwise-confounding developments, provides certainty to a complex world, and alleviates numerous factions of responsibility – so media outlets and their journalists are lavishly rewarded any time they publish accusatory stories about Russia (especially ones involving the U.S. election), even if they end up being debunked.

A highly touted story yesterday from the New York Times – claiming that Russians used Twitter more widely known than before to manipulate U.S. politics – demonstrates this recklessness. The story is based on the claims of a new group formed just two months ago by a union of neocons and Democratic national security officials, led by long-time liars and propagandists such as Bill Kristol, former acting CIA chief Mike Morell, and Bush Homeland Security Secretary Mike Chertoff. I reported on the founding of this group, calling itself the Alliance for Securing Democracy, when it was unveiled (this is not to be confused with the latest new Russia group unveiled last week by Rob Reiner and David Frum and featuring a different former national security state official (former DNI James Clapper) – calling itself InvestigateRussia.org – featuring a video declaring that the U.S. is now “at war with Russia”).

The Kristol/Morell/Chertoff group on which the Times based its article has a very simple tactic: they secretly decide which Twitter accounts are “Russia bots,” meaning accounts that disseminate an “anti-American message” and are controlled by the Kremlin. They refuse to tell anyone which Twitter accounts they decided are Kremlin-loyal, nor will they identify their methodology for creating their lists or determining what constitutes “anti-Americanism.”

They do it all in secret, and you’re just supposed to trust them: Bill Kristol, Mike Chertoff and their national security state friends. And the New York Times is apparently fine with this demand, as evidenced by its uncritical acceptance yesterday of the claims of this group – a group formed by the nation’s least trustworthy sources.

But no matter. It’s a claim about nefarious Russian control. So it’s instantly vested with credibility and authority, published by leading news outlets, and then blindly accepted as fact in most elite circles. From now on, it will simply be Fact – based on the New York Times article – that the Kremlin aggressively and effectively weaponized Twitter to manipulate public opinion and sow divisions during the election, even though the evidence for this new story is the secret, unverifiable assertions of a group filled with the most craven neocons and national security state liars.

That’s how the Russia narrative is constantly “reported,” and it’s the reason so many of the biggest stories have embarrassingly collapsed. It’s because the Russia story of 2017 – not unlike the Iraq discourse of 2002 – is now driven by religious-like faith rather than rational faculties.

No questioning of official claims is allowed. The evidentiary threshold which an assertion must overcome before being accepted is so low as to be non-existent. And the penalty for desiring to see evidence for official claims, or questioning the validity and persuasiveness of the evidence that is proffered, are accusations that impugn one’s patriotism and loyalty (simply wanting to see evidence for official claims about Russia is proof, in many quarters, that one is a Kremlin agent or at least adores Putin – just as wanting to see evidence in 2002, or questioning the evidence presented for claims about Saddam, was viewed as proof that one harbored sympathy for the Iraqi dictator).

Regardless of your views on Russia, Trump and the rest, nobody can possibly regard this climate as healthy. Just look at how many major, incredibly inflammatory stories, from major media outlets, have collapsed. Is it not clear that there is something very wrong with how we are discussing and reporting on relations between these two nuclear-armed powers?

The post Yet Another Major Russia Story Falls Apart. Is Skepticism Permissible Yet? appeared first on The Intercept.

There should be nothing whatsoever surprising about any of this, as it is the logical and necessary outcome of the self-serving template of immunity which D.C. elites have erected for themselves. The Bush administration was filled with high-level officials who did not just lie from podiums, but did so in service of actual war crimes. They invaded and destroyed a country of 26 million people based on blatant falsehoods and relentless propaganda. They instituted a worldwide torture regime by issuing decrees that purported to redefine what that term meant. They spied on the communications of American citizens without the warrants required by law. They kidnapped innocent people from foreign soil and sent them to be tortured in the dungeons of the world’s worst regimes, and rounded up Muslims on domestic soil with no charges. They imprisoned Muslim journalists for years without a whiff of due process. And they generally embraced and implemented the fundamental tenets of authoritarianism by explicitly positioning the president and his White House above the law.

We’re supposed to all forget about that, or at least agree to minimize it, in service of this revisionist conceit that the United States has long been governed by noble, honorable, and decent people until Donald Trump defaced the sanctity of the Oval Office with his band of gauche miscreants and evil clowns. Many of the same people who, just a decade ago, were depicting Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Paul Wolfowitz — remember them? — as monsters of historic proportions are today propagating the mythology that Trump is desecrating what had always been sacred and benevolent American civic space.

Not only were all Bush officials fully immunized from the legal consequences of their crimes — in D.C., that’s a given — but they were also fully welcomed back into decent, elite society with breakneck speed, lavished with honors, rewards, lucrative jobs, and praise. Those same Bush officials responsible for the most horrific crimes are now beloved by many of the same circles that, today, are expressing such righteous rage that Spicer is allowed onto the Emmy stage and a classroom at Harvard.

The Sean Spicer of torture and the Iraq War, Ari Fleischer, is a regular CNN contributor and makes many millions of dollars on the speaking circuit and providing communications consulting advice to large corporations and sports teams. One of the most vocal proponents of torture, former Bush and Rumsfeld speechwriter Marc Thiessen, was hired as a columnist by the Washington Post shortly after his torture-advocating book was published, and he remains employed there.

John Yoo, author of the memos justifying torture and lawlessness, is on the faculty of Berkeley Law School, where he holds an endowed chair. Condoleezza Rice, who literally chaired the meetings inside the White House where torture was choreographed to the last detail and crusaded for the invasion of Iraq, is not only on the faculty of Stanford but serves on the boards of multiple Fortune 500 corporations and is virtually universally beloved.

Darth Cheney himself, after leaving the Bush administration, made millions from a book that he was able to promote by being welcomed onto all major television networks, where he was treated like a wise, old statesman. When a marble bust of him was unveiled at the Capitol, Joe Biden — whose administration had previously immunized Bush officials from prosecution for war crimes — attended to pay homage and heap praise on his predecessor, gushing: “I actually like Dick Cheney.”

The rehabilitation of George W. Bush has been as widespread as it has been nauseating, culminating with a recent appearance on the talk show of liberal icon Ellen DeGeneres, who hugged him, hailed him as a personal friend, invited him to denounce Trump for sullying the office which Bush served with such honor, and then posted warm and loving pictures of the pair to her 48 million followers on Instagram.

Hillary Clinton, in her new book, fondly recalls how “George [W. Bush] actually called just minutes after I finished my concession speech, and graciously waited on the line while I hugged my team and supporters one last time. When we talked, he suggested we find time to get burgers together.” She added: “I think that’s Texan for ‘I feel your pain.'” We’ve put all that Iraq War, torture, and rendition unpleasantness behind us — just some good-faith policy disputes — and now see him as a nice, kind, decent, and honorable statesman.

In a recent interview with Vulture, the weekend MSNBC host Joy Reid, a former Obama campaign aide, gushed about the favorable views she now holds about, and the alignments she has now formed with, the Bush-era neocons who helped justify and usher in some of the most repugnant abuses and war crimes in American history:

Vulture: On the flip side, it has to be a bit heartening that some conservatives who used to be sort of MSNBC “villains” are now on your network trashing a Republican president.

Reid: One of the most amazing outcomes of the Trump administration is the number of neo-conservatives that are now my friends and I am aligned with. I found myself agreeing on a panel with Bill Kristol. I agree more with Jennifer Rubin, David Frum, and Max Boot than I do with some people on the far left. I am shocked at the way that Donald Trump has brought people together. [Laughs.]

So if initiating an aggressive war (which the Nuremberg Tribunal called “the supreme international crime”), instituting an international torture regime (which Ronald Reagan called “an abhorrent practice” that no circumstance can justify), and embracing the full model of presidential lawlessness does not result in ostracization, sanction, or exclusion from polite society, why on earth would anyone expect that Sean Spicer would face any sort of actual recrimination or consequence?

If you’re someone who employs David Frum or hires Ari Fleischer or treats Bush-era war criminals as respectable and honored sources, you really have no standing to object to the paradigm that has ushered Spicer into the halls of elite power. This is the precedent of elite immunity that has been created, often by the same people who are now so upset that Sean Spicer and his fellow Trump functionaries are the beneficiaries of the framework they helped to install.

The post Sean Spicer Is Honored Because — As Bush Officials Have Shown — D.C. Elites Always Thrive appeared first on The Intercept.

An hourlong interview she sat for with Vox’s Ezra Klein is particularly worthwhile. Clinton, for good reason, harbors a great deal of affection for Klein, which she expressed on multiple occasions during their chat. But Klein nonetheless pressed her on a series of criticisms that have been voiced about her and the Democrats’ stunted political approach, banal policies, status-quo-perpetuating worldview, and cramped aspirations that seem far more plausible as authors of her defeat than the familiar array of villains — Bernie Sanders, Vladimir Putin, Jill Stein, Jim Comey, the New York Times — that she and her most ardent supporters are eager to blame.

Despite being illuminating, Klein’s discussion with Clinton contains a glaring though quite common omission: There is not a word about the role of foreign policy and endless war during the entire hour. While some of this may be attributable to Klein’s perfectly valid journalistic focus on domestic policies, such as health care, a huge factor in Clinton’s political career and how she is perceived — as a senator and especially as secretary of state — is her advocacy of multiple wars and other military actions, many, if not all, of which were rather disastrous, rendering it quite strange to spend an hour discussing why she lost without so much as mentioning any of that.

This is not so much a critique of Klein’s specific interview (which, again, is worthwhile) as it is reflective of the broader Democratic Party desire to pretend that the foreign wars it has repeatedly prosecuted, and the endless killing of innocent people for which it is responsible, do not exist. Part of that is the discomfort of cognitive dissonance: the Democratic branding and self-glorification as enemies of privilege, racism, and violence are directly in conflict with the party’s long-standing eagerness to ignore, or even actively support, policies which kill large numbers of innocent people from Pakistan, Libya, and Somalia to Yemen, Iraq, and Gaza, but which receive scant attention because of the nationality, ethnicity, poverty, distance, and general invisibility of their victims.

But a major part of this minimization is a misperception of the domestic political importance of these policies. From the beginning of his candidacy through the general election, Donald Trump rhetorically positioned himself as a vehement opponent of endless war, inveighing against both parties when doing so.

Though there is now a revisionist effort underway to falsely depict those who pointed this out as being gullible believers in Trump’s dovish and antiwar credentials, the reality is that most of us who warned of the efficacy of Trump’s antiwar campaign theme made explicitly clear that there was no reason to believe Trump would actually be dovish if he were elected. Indeed, from Trump’s history of endorsing the wars he was denouncing to his calls for greater and more savage bombing to his desire to nullify the Iran deal, there was ample reasons to doubt that he would usher in dovishness of any kind. But the point was that Trump’s antiwar posturing was a politically potent approach because of how unpopular endless war and militarism have become:

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/717349622826549249

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/717347431457931264

These warnings — about the efficacy of Trump’s attacks on America’s bipartisan posture of Endless War — largely fell on deaf ears. Clinton continued to defend the virtues of her record of militarism, and even now, those topics are excluded almost completely from discussions of why Clinton lost.

What makes this exclusion particularly notable is that empirical data suggests that questions of endless war and militarism played a big, if not decisive, role in the outcome of the 2016 election. A study published earlier this year by Boston University political science professor Douglas Kriner and Minnesota Law School’s Francis Shen makes the case quite compellingly.

The paper notes that Trump did not run as any kind of pacifist but rather as someone who “promised a foreign policy that would be both simultaneously more muscular and more restrained,” yet “promised to be much more reticent” in committing the U.S. to new, foreign military adventures. The scholars argue that not only military families but Americans generally have grown increasingly hostile to these policies:

In one sense, all Americans have been affected by fifteen years of nearly continuous war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Americans of all stripes have watched each conflict’s developments unfold through extensive media coverage, movies, and personal stories from veterans returning from combat. Indeed, so great are its posited effects on American society that some analysts have proclaimed the emergence of an “Iraq Syndrome,” echoing the public skepticism about the efficacy of the use of force and the growing popular reluctance to employ it that emerged after Vietnam.

Clinton was uniquely ill-suited to channel this widespread sentiment given that she has vocally supported almost every proposed U.S. war and military intervention over the last 20 years (including ones Obama rejected in places such as Syria and Ukraine and, of course, Iraq). For that reason, she was one of the leading symbols of war and militarism, perhaps its most potent one, and Trump — however deceitful and cynical it might have been — positioned himself as her opposite.

From these premises, the authors argue that had the U.S. fought fewer wars, or at least experienced fewer casualties, Clinton would have won those three states and thus won the election:

One need not uncritically accept this maximalist conclusion to acknowledge the vital point: Clinton specifically and Democrats generally are perceived, with good reason, to be proponents of endless war policies that critical constituencies now despise. From a policy perspective, endless war and militarism shape virtually every key issue, from budgetary priorities and tax policy to corporatism and lobbyist power, making it inexcusable on the merits to ignore or downplay them. But also as a political matter, any discussion of why Clinton lost, or what the Democrats must reform, is woefully incomplete if it excludes these questions.

The post The Clinton Book Tour Is Largely Ignoring the Vital Role of Endless War in the 2016 Election Result appeared first on The Intercept.

Drum’s controversial passage came when he attempted to reconcile these views with this reasoning (emphasis in original):

The researchers solved their conundrum by suggesting that most people are disgusted by the homeless. No kidding. About half the homeless suffer from a mental illness and a third abuse either alcohol or drugs. You’d be crazy not to have a reflexive disgust of a population like that. Is that really so hard to get?

Drum hastened to say that “none of this means we can’t or shouldn’t have empathy for the homeless,” adding, “of course we should, if we want to call ourselves decent human beings.” But he again reiterated his view that disgust for homeless people is natural and sane: “There’s just no need to deny that these reflexes are both innate and perfectly understandable.”

The profound problems with Drum’s argument are self-evident. To begin with, it relies on a crude, ugly stereotype of homeless people — as well as addicts and people with mental health problems — that makes it hard to believe Drum ever interacts with any people in any of those groups. The work I’ve done with homeless people over the last two years confirms what should be extremely obvious: Many people end up living on the street because of some combination of economic hardship, bad luck, job loss, and a lack of family support; any decent human being reacts to their plight with sympathy, empathy, and compassion — not disgust.

Worse, the reasoning in the Mother Jones article implies that people are naturally and justifiably disgusted by those who lose their homes, struggle with addiction, or have mental health afflictions. Who still thinks this way? It’s as if a caricature of some 1950s retrograde moralizer was reincarnated as a 21st-century columnist for a magazine named after a fiery pro-labor revolutionary.

But perhaps the most serious problem is one raised by the researchers on whom the Mother Jones article purports to rely. In an email to me, which I promptly posted on Twitter, one those researchers — professor Spencer Piston of Boston University — objected that the Mother Jones article profoundly misrepresented their research:

Especially infuriating to me is that he misinterpreted our scholarship to do so. We argue that media coverage of homeless people often portrays them as unclean or diseased, which activates disgust among the general public. But he cites our research as proof that homeless people are inherently disgusting — which perpetuates the very problem in journalism our research was trying to solve.

When that produced no response of any kind from Mother Jones, Piston, along with his co-researcher, professor Scott Clifford of the University of Houston, elaborated on these objections in a short piece they submitted for publication by The Intercept. We are posting it here in its entirety:

We recently reported on our research analyzing why so many people who want to help homeless people also support policies that hurt homeless people, such as banning sleeping in public and banning panhandling. Our key finding was that support for these counterproductive policies is driven in part by disgust. That is, in some circumstances, people feel disgust toward homeless people, and as a result seek to avoid them. This motivates some to support exclusionary policies that keep homeless people out of the public eye.

Unfortunately, our scholarship was misinterpreted in some quarters, so here we set the record straight about what our research did — and did not — show.

What we actually found is that the relationship between disgust and public views about homelessness policy depends on three factors. First, it depends on the individual: As previous scholarship in psychology has demonstrated, some people are more prone to feeling the emotion of disgust, or “disgust sensitive,” than others. Second, it depends on whether the policy under consideration is exclusionary. That is, disgust makes people more likely to support policies that remove homeless people from public life, but it doesn’t really affect public opinion about policies that transfer resources to homeless people. Third, disgust is especially likely to be activated when the news media portray homeless people as unclean — as disease threats.

Kevin Drum of Mother Jones reacted to our scholarship as follows:

“No kidding. About half the homeless suffer from a mental illness and a third abuse either alcohol or drugs. You’d be crazy not to have a reflexive disgust of a population like that.”

From our perspective, there are a few things wrong with this statement. We don’t think feelings of disgust toward homeless people are a foregone conclusion rooted in the characteristics of the population. Rather, we suspect that these disgust reactions are primarily due to the fact that homeless people largely lack access to health care and sanitation. Even given this fact, though, not everyone will feel disgust toward homeless people — the emotion is the product of an interaction between personality and context, such as exposure to certain forms of media coverage.

The irony here is that even as Drum distorted our point, he also provided a perfect illustration of it. His depiction of homeless people as inevitably disgusting provides a perfect example of the journalistic coverage of homeless people that we argue is so common, and that our scholarship finds to have such pernicious effects. Portraying homeless people as inevitably or essentially disgusting serves to dehumanize those who are merely struggling to survive.

Drum also seems to imply that disgust is somehow rational or justifiable. However, the emotion is hypersensitive and may promote all sorts of undesirable attitudes and behaviors. In Drum’s defense, he goes on to say that disgust is something that we ought to try to overcome. We agree. Feeling disgust is largely not the result of a conscious choice and it can be extremely difficult to override these feelings. As a result, we don’t think that people should be demonized for feeling disgust.

Unfortunately, many people feel disgust toward homeless people and other marginalized groups, and it can guide our opinions and behaviors even when we know better. Research suggests that the best way to overcome the effects of disgust and prejudice is to spend time considering the perspectives and preferences of members of those groups — which is another reason why it is so important how homeless people are portrayed in the media.

Once this statement was submitted, we sought comment from Mother Jones Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery (who has her own controversial history of statements about homeless people). As a courtesy, I sent her the entire objection from the professors.

After stating that she was unaware of their objections despite my posting their email on Twitter, and after insisting that Drum’s full paragraph be included (it was already discussed in the professors’ article, and I’ve now quoted it), she had only this to say: “Piston and Clifford’s point is that ‘support for these counterproductive policies is driven in part by disgust.’ Kevin was attempting, in a very brief post, to challenge readers and policymakers to contend with those shortcomings of compassion.”

At the very least, it seems that if researchers cited by a magazine object that their findings have been radically distorted, to the point where the research is cited to support a conclusion that the research actually negates, that requires a more serious response than the one Jeffery produced here.

But whatever else is true, having these scholars clarify the actual insights of their research into homelessness — and specifically making clear that it is Drum’s mentality that is the cause of so many of the woes of the homeless population — means that some good came out of Mother Jones’s ugly meditations on the “reflexive” and rational disgust toward one of the world’s most marginalized and oppressed populations.

Top photo: A homeless man prepares to sleep during a cold night in downtown Sao Paulo, Brazil, Wednesday, July 19, 2017.

The post Scholars Say Mother Jones Distorted Their Research for Anti-Homeless Article appeared first on The Intercept.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow devoted the first 21 minutes of her Thursday night program to what she promoted as an “exclusive” scoop. The cable news host said that someone had sent her a “carefully forged” top-secret NSA document that used a top-secret document The Intercept reported on and published on June 5 as a template. That document — from the June 5 Intercept report — was from an unknown NSA official, and purported to describe Russian attempts to hack election officials and suppliers.

Maddow said her report should serve as a “heads up” to other news organizations that someone is attempting to destroy the credibility of those who report on Trump’s connections to Russia by purposely giving them false information. She suggested, without stating, that this may have been what caused CNN and other outlets recently to publish reports about Trump and/or Russia that ended up being retracted.

The grave tone of cloak-and-daggers mystery Maddow used to tell her story was predicated on her timeline of events. If it were the case that MSNBC had received the purportedly forged version of this document before The Intercept published its own version, that would indeed be a major story. That would mean that the person who sent the forgery to MSNBC was one of a relatively small group of people who would have had access to this top-secret document.

But that’s not what happened. By Maddow’s own telling, MSNBC received the document two days after The Intercept published it for the entire world to see. That means that literally anyone with internet access could have taken the document from The Intercept’s site, altered it, and sent it to Maddow.

Despite the fact that she received the document two days after The Intercept published it, Maddow nonetheless suggested that the document may have been forged before The Intercept’s publication — meaning that the forger had access to the document prior to our publication of it. Her theory, which posits a remarkable scenario, rests exclusively on one claim: that the “creation date” in the metadata of the document precedes The Intercept’s publication by slightly more than three hours.

Even though Maddow acknowledged what is plainly true — that the time stamp could have been easily altered to make it appear that the document was created before The Intercept’s publication — she showed a graphic of the purported timeline of events, which depicted the forged document’s creation as occurring just over three hours prior to The Intercept’s publication (12:17:15 p.m. on June 5):

This seems to be a remarkably thin reed on which to base such an improbable yet consequential theory. To begin with, as Maddow acknowledged, the “creation date” in the document’s metadata could be easily altered. It’s also possible that simple time zones explain the discrepancy: that whoever forged the document was in a time zone several hours behind East Coast time, and June 5, 12:17 p.m., in that time zone is after The Intercept’s publication, not before.

The story is much sexier and more dramatic if the forger had access to the document before The Intercept’s publication — and Maddow does a lot of work to suggest this to viewers — but the far likelier version, based on what Maddow presented, is that someone among the millions of people in the public who read the story and saw the document on The Intercept’s site sent an altered version to Maddow.

But here’s the key point, one that guts MSNBC’s theory completely. If you look at the time stamp on the metadata on the document that The Intercept published, it reads “June 5, 12:17:15 p.m.” — exactly the same time and date, to the second, as the one on the document received by Maddow:

That’s because time stamps on the documents published by The Intercept designate the creation date included in the PDF we publish on DocumentCloud: In this case, that occurred just over three hours prior to publication of our article. Both versions — the one we published and the one Maddow received — reflect the same time to the second: literally the exact moment when we created and uploaded the document.

In other words, anyone who took the document directly from The Intercept’s site would have a document with exactly the same time stamp as the one Maddow showed. Thus, rather than proving that this document was created before The Intercept’s publication, the time stamp featured by Maddow strongly suggests exactly the opposite: that it was taken from The Intercept’s site.

Nobody from Maddow’s show or MSNBC reached out to The Intercept before running this story. This was odd for many reasons, including the fact that Maddow offered several speculative theories about The Intercept’s reporting on the document, including her belief that a crease that appeared on the document sent to her was the same as the crease that the Trump DOJ, in its affidavit, claimed appeared on The Intercept’s document.

Had MSNBC sought comment from The Intercept before broadcasting this story, they would have learned that the sole piece of evidence on which their entire theory was predicated — the time stamp that preceded The Intercept’s publication by a few hours — strongly suggests that whoever sent them the document did not have special, early, pre-publication access to it, but rather took it from The Intercept’s site.

Prior to publication of this article, The Intercept sent a series of questions to Maddow about all of this. She said MSNBC did not contact The Intercept prior to broadcasting her report “because we were really only working on the document you published, not in your reporting on it.”

As for the issues of the timeline, Maddow stressed that “we explicitly *didn’t* say it was sent to us prior to your publication. I said — and we even showed a calendar graphic to illustrate — that it was sent to us *after* you published. No one falsely made it appear that it was sent to us prior to your publication. It came to us afterwards — which is what I said on the air.”

Regarding our inquiries about the possibility that the metadata may have been changed, Maddow said: “yes, like I said on the air, we did look into the possibility of altering the metadata to change the apparent creation date, and, as I said, it could definitely have been altered.”

As for our question that pointed out that the exact same time appears in the metadata on the document sent to her as the one we published, strongly suggesting that whoever sent her the document took it from The Intercept’s site, Maddow said: “We got a document *different* than yours, with no purported connection to yours, except we sussed out that someone appears to have used your doc as a template for ginning up a fake one to sent to us. And yes the timestamp absolutely goes to our whole point — someone used the document sent to you as a template for forging the fake document sent to us.”

One can listen to Maddow’s original report and draw your own conclusions. That she was strongly suggesting that the forger obtained the document prior to The Intercept’s publication — and thus must have had special access to it — was something heard by numerous people. Here, for instance, is Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes citing Maddow’s report to strongly imply — falsely — that this all happened because of the The Intercept’s poor security and that our servers were “penetrated”:

https://twitter.com/benjaminwittes/status/883285835768098816

That is an utter fabrication, but it’s what he — and many others — heard from Maddow’s report. All this accusatory innuendo when — as the evidence proves — the overwhelmingly likely reality is quite mundane: that someone simply took the document from our site after we published it and used it to create a potentially forged document that was sent to Maddow.

None of this is to suggest that there is no newsworthy story here. It appears, at least if one accepts Maddow’s descriptions of the document, that someone did send her an altered document. But there is a massive difference in terms of the importance of this story if it was sent by some random person from the public who obtained the document after The Intercept published it, as opposed to someone who had access to it before publication.

And virtually nothing proves the latter, far more explosive timeline that Maddow’s graphics suggested. To the contrary, all of the available evidence strongly suggests it was taken from The Intercept’s site after we published it.

Maddow is absolutely correct to underscore the critical importance for media outlets to authenticate documents of the type that one receives, particularly when the source is unknown. She also makes the important point that it is “logistically difficult” for news organizations to authenticate documents of this type; given the obvious reluctance of government officials to be of help, it is a serious journalistic challenge to obtain the necessary confirmation that such documents are genuine before reporting on them.

While it is of course possible that there is some widespread, coordinated, official effort to feed news outlets false information in order to discredit stories about Trump and Russia, there is no real evidence for that theory, and this story does not offer any. Maddow’s warnings about the need for caution and authentication are important ones, but if — as seems likely — the document MSNBC received was sent by someone who got it from The Intercept’s site, then the significance of this story seems very minimal, and the more ominous theories her report raises seem to be baseless.

UPDATE: Ben Wittes, to his credit, apologized for the false claims he made after watching Maddow’s report:

https://twitter.com/benjaminwittes/status/883405188609974274

https://twitter.com/benjaminwittes/status/883403679566516226

Top photo: Rachel Maddow on set for her news show on MSNBC in New York on March 9, 2017.

The post Rachel Maddow’s Exclusive “Scoop” About a Fake NSA Document Raises Several Key Questions appeared first on The Intercept.

A controversy erupted late Tuesday night after CNN published an article announcing that it had uncovered the identity of the anonymous Reddit user who created the video of President Donald Trump punching a CNN logo. CNN and other outlets had previously reported that this user, who uses a pseudonym, had also posted anti-Semitic and racist content on Reddit, including an image identifying all of the Jewish employees of CNN, designated with a Jewish star next to their photos.

Though CNN decided — for now — not to reveal his name, the network made clear that this discretion was predicated on the user’s lengthy public apology, his promise not to repeat the behavior, and his status as a private citizen. But in its article, the network explicitly threatened that it could change its mind about withholding the user’s real name if his behavior changes in the future:

CNN is not publishing “HanA**holeSolo’s” name because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again. In addition, he said his statement could serve as an example to others not to do the same.

CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.

Several of the objections made to CNN’s conduct here appear to be false. That includes the claim by the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. that the user threatened by CNN is 15 years old (the CNN reporter, Andrew Kaczynski, said the Reddit user is an adult). The claim that CNN “blackmailed” the user into apologizing — expressed by a Twitter hashtag, #CNNBlackmail, that still sits at the top of trending topics on the site — seems dubious at best, since there is no evidence the user spoke to CNN before posting his apology (though CNN itself says it contacted the user the day before he posted his apology, which presumably means he knew CNN had found out his name when he posted it).

But the invalidity of those particular accusations does not exonerate CNN. There is something self-evidently creepy, bullying, and heavy-handed about a large news organization publicly announcing that it will expose someone’s identity if he ever again publishes content on the internet that the network deems inappropriate or objectionable. Whether it was CNN’s intent or not, the article makes it appear as if CNN will be monitoring this citizen’s online writing, and will punish him with exposure if he writes something the network dislikes.

There is also something untoward about the fact that CNN — the subject of the original video — was the news outlet that uncovered his identity. That fact creates the appearance of vengeance: If you, even as a random and anonymous internet user, post content critical of CNN, then it will use its vast corporate resources to investigate you, uncover your identity, and threaten to expose you if you ever do so again.

The reality here is likely more complicated. The most offensive passage here — “CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change” — sounds like classic lawyer language that executives or corporate lawyers would demand be included. It does not sound like something a typical journalist would write on their own. (CNN did not respond to The Intercept’s inquiries about who inserted this language or what future behavior on the part of the user might trigger CNN’s threat to expose him; we will update this article if any response is received.)

And CNN’s role in discovering this user’s identity is likely more a byproduct of Kaczynski’s well-established internet-sleuthing skills than a corporate decision to target a critic. Indeed, the decision to withhold the person’s name — had it been made without the threat to expose it in the future — could arguably be heralded as a commendable case of journalistic restraint.

In response to the controversy last night, Kaczynski argued that “this line is being misinterpreted. It was intended only to mean we made no agreement [with] the man about his identity.” That may have been CNN’s intent, but that is not what the sentence says.

Whatever the intent, this is a case where one of the nation’s most powerful media corporations is explicitly threatening a critic with exposure should he publish material that the network deems — based on its own secret standards — to be worthy of punishment. And the threat comes in the wake of his groveling public apology, posted less than a day after he learned CNN had discovered his identity.

There is also a real question about whether a news organization — when deciding what information is newsworthy — should take into account factors such as whether someone is remorseful for what they said and whether they promise not to express similar views in the future. Those considerations seem to be the province of those vested with the power to punish bad behavior — a parent, a police officer, or a judge — rather than a news outlet. All of this has a strong whiff of CNN deciding who is a good boy and who is a bad boy based on the content of their views, and doling out journalistic punishments and rewards accordingly.

Moreover, if this person’s name is newsworthy — on the ground that racists or others who post inflammatory content should be publicly exposed and vilified — does it matter if he expressed what CNN executives regard as sufficient remorse? And if his name is not newsworthy, then why should CNN be threatening to reveal it in the event that he makes future utterances that the network dislikes?

If you’re someone who believes that media corporations should expose the identity even of random, anonymous internet users who express anti-Semitic or racist views, then you should be prepared to identify the full list of views that merit similar treatment. Should anyone who supports Trump have their identity exposed? Those who oppose marriage equality? Those with views deemed sexist? Those who advocate communism? Are you comfortable with having corporate media executives decide which views merit public exposure?

Whatever else is true, CNN is a massive media corporation that is owned by an even larger corporation. It has virtually unlimited resources. We should cheer when those resources are brought to bear to investigate those who exercise great political and economic power. But when they are used to threaten and punish a random, obscure citizen who has criticized the network — no matter how objectionable his views might be — it resembles corporate bullying and creepy censorship more than actual journalism.

UPDATE: CNN just issued a statement in response to the controversy its article provoked:

All of these claims are already included in this article, but note two key points: 1) While the Reddit user’s apology was posted before he spoke to any CNN reporter, he posted it after he was contacted by CNN, which means he knew when he publicly apologized that the network had unearthed his identity; and, more importantly, 2) CNN’s claim that it merely meant to convey “that there was no deal” is squarely at odds with what its article actually warned: “CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.”

That sentence — which can only be read as a threat to reveal his name should he post more offending material in the future — is what has triggered the anger at CNN, and the network’s statement does not address that at all. Finally, CNN apparently refuses to say whether this threatening language was included by its reporter (who has borne the brunt of the public anger) or by its lawyers and executives demanding that it be included.

Top photo: Newsroom at CNN world headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia.

The post CNN Warns It May Expose an Anonymous Critic if He Ever Again Publishes Bad Content appeared first on The Intercept.

In announcing the resignation of the three journalists — Thomas Frank, who wrote the story (not the same Thomas Frank who wrote “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”); Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Eric Lichtblau, recently hired away from the New York Times; and Lex Haris, head of a new investigative unit — CNN said that “standard editorial processes were not followed when the article was published.” The resignations follow CNN’s Friday night retraction of the story, in which it apologized to Scaramucci:

Several factors compound CNN’s embarrassment here. To begin with, CNN’s story was first debunked by an article in Sputnik News, which explained that the investment fund documented several “factual inaccuracies” in the report (including that the fund is not even part of the Russian bank, Vnesheconombank, that is under investigation), and by Breitbart, which cited numerous other factual inaccuracies.

And this episode follows an embarrassing correction CNN was forced to issue earlier this month when several of its highest-profile on-air personalities asserted — based on anonymous sources — that James Comey, in his congressional testimony, was going to deny Trump’s claim that the FBI director assured him he was not the target of any investigation.

When Comey confirmed Trump’s story, CNN was forced to correct its story. “An earlier version of this story said that Comey would dispute Trump’s interpretation of their conversations. But based on his prepared remarks, Comey outlines three conversations with the president in which he told Trump he was not personally under investigation,” said the network.

But CNN is hardly alone when it comes to embarrassing retractions regarding Russia. Over and over, major U.S. media outlets have published claims about the Russia Threat that turned out to be completely false — always in the direction of exaggerating the threat and/or inventing incriminating links between Moscow and the Trump circle. In virtually all cases, those stories involved evidence-free assertions from anonymous sources that these media outlets uncritically treated as fact, only for it to be revealed that they were entirely false.

Several of the most humiliating of these episodes have come from the Washington Post. On December 30, the paper published a blockbuster, frightening scoop that immediately and predictably went viral and generated massive traffic. Russian hackers, the paper claimed based on anonymous sources, had hacked into the “U.S. electricity grid” through a Vermont utility.

Breaking: Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont https://t.co/LED11lL7ej

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) December 31, 2016

That, in turn, led MSNBC journalists, and various Democratic officials, to instantly sound the alarm that Putin was trying to deny Americans heat during the winter:

Literally every facet of that story turned out to be false. First, the utility company — which the Post had not bothered to contact — issued a denial, pointing out that malware was found on one laptop that was not connected either to the Vermont grid or the broader U.S. electricity grid. That forced the Post to change the story to hype the still-alarmist claim that this malware “showed the risk” posed by Russia to the U.S. electric grid, along with a correction at the top repudiating the story’s central claim:

But then it turned out that even this limited malware was not connected to Russian hackers at all and, indeed, may not have been malicious code of any kind. Those revelations forced the Post to publish a new article days later entirely repudiating the original story.

Embarrassments of this sort are literally too numerous to count when it comes to hyped, viral U.S. media stories over the last year about the Russia Threat. Less than a month before its electric grid farce, the Post published a blockbuster story — largely based on a blacklist issued by a brand new, entirely anonymous group — featuring the shocking assertion that stories planted or promoted by Russia’s “disinformation campaign” were viewed more than 213 million times.

That story fell apart almost immediately. The McCarthyite blacklist of Russia disinformation outlets on which it relied contained numerous mainstream sites. The article was widely denounced. And the Post, two weeks later, appended a lengthy editor’s note at the top:

Weeks earlier, Slate published another article that went viral on Trump and Russia, claiming that a secret server had been discovered that the Trump Organization used to communicate with a Russian bank. After that story was hyped by Hillary Clinton herself, multiple news outlets (including The Intercept) debunked it, noting that the story had been shopped around for months but found no takers. Ultimately, the Washington Post made clear how reckless the claims were:

A few weeks later, C-SPAN made big news when it announced that its network had been “interrupted by RT programming”:

pic.twitter.com/ybUWoxNTLn

— CSPAN (@cspan) January 12, 2017

That led numerous media outlets, such as Fortune, to claim that this occurred due to Russian hacking – yet that, too, turned out to be totally baseless, and Fortune was forced to renounce the claim:

In the same time period — December 2016 — The Guardian published a story by reporter Ben Jacobs claiming that WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, had “long had a close relationship with the Putin regime.” That claim, along with several others in the story, was fabricated, and The Guardian was forced to append a retraction to the story:

Perhaps the most significant Russia falsehood came from CrowdStrike, the firm hired by the DNC to investigate the hack of its email servers. Again in the same time period — December 2016 — the firm issued a new report accusing Russian hackers of nefarious activities involving the Ukrainian army, which numerous outlets, including (of course) the Washington Post, uncritically hyped.

“A cybersecurity firm has uncovered strong proof of the tie between the group that hacked the Democratic National Committee and Russia’s military intelligence arm — the primary agency behind the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 election,” the Post claimed. “The firm CrowdStrike linked malware used in the DNC intrusion to malware used to hack and track an Android phone app used by the Ukrainian army in its battle against pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine from late 2014 through 2016.”

Yet that story also fell apart. In March, the firm “revised and retracted statements it used to buttress claims of Russian hacking during last year’s American presidential election campaign” after several experts questioned its claims, and “CrowdStrike walked back key parts of its Ukraine report.”

What is most notable about these episodes is that they all go in the same direction: hyping and exaggerating the threat posed by the Kremlin. All media outlets will make mistakes; that is to be expected. But when all of the “mistakes” are devoted to the same rhetorical theme, and when they all end up advancing the same narrative goal, it seems clear that they are not the byproduct of mere garden-variety journalistic mistakes.

There are great benefits to be reaped by publishing alarmist claims about the Russian Threat and Trump’s connection to it. Stories that depict the Kremlin and Putin as villains and grave menaces are the ones that go most viral, produce the most traffic, generate the most professional benefits such as TV offers, along with online praise and commercial profit for those who disseminate them. That’s why blatantly inane anti-Trump conspiracists and Russia conspiracies now command such a large audience: because there is a voracious appetite among anti-Trump internet and cable news viewers for stories, no matter how false, that they want to believe are true (and, conversely, expressing any skepticism about such stories results in widespread accusations that one is a Kremlin sympathizer or outright agent).

One can, if one wishes, view the convergence of those ample benefits and this long line of reckless stories on Russia as a coincidence, but that seems awfully generous, if not willfully gullible. There are substantial professional and commercial rewards for those who do this and — at least until the resignation of these CNN journalists last night — very few consequences even when they are caught.

A related, and perhaps more significant, dynamic is that journalistic standards are often dispensed with when it comes to exaggerating the threat posed by countries deemed to be the official enemy du jour. That is a journalistic principle that has repeatedly asserted itself, with Iraq being the most memorable but by no means only example.

In sum, anything is fair game when it comes to circulating accusations about official U.S. adversaries, no matter how baseless, and Russia currently occupies that role. (More generally: The less standing and power one has in official Washington, the more acceptable it is in U.S. media circles to publish false claims about them, as this recent, shockingly falsehood-ridden New York Times article about RT host Lee Camp illustrates; it, too, now contains multiple corrections.)

And then there is the fact that the vast majority of reporting about Russia, as well as Trump’s alleged ties to the Kremlin, has been based exclusively on evidence-free assertions of anonymous officials, many, if not most, of whom have concealed agendas. That means that they are free to issue completely false claims without the slightest concern of repercussions.

That there is now a fundamental problem with reporting on Russia appears to be a fact accepted even by CNN executives. In the wake of this latest debacle, a CNN editor issued a memo, leaked to BuzzFeed, imposing new editorial safeguards on “any content involving Russia.” That is a rather remarkable indictment on media behavior when it comes to Moscow.

The importance of this journalistic malfeasance when it comes to Russia, a nuclear-armed power, cannot be overstated. This is the story that has dominated U.S. politics for more than a year. Ratcheting up tensions between these two historically hostile powers is incredibly inflammatory and dangerous. All kinds of claims, no matter how little evidence there is to support them, have flooded U.S. political discourse and have been treated as proven fact.

And that’s all independent of how journalistic recklessness fuels, and gives credence to, the Trump administration’s campaign to discredit journalism generally. The president wasted no time exploiting this latest failure to attack the media:

Wow, CNN had to retract big story on "Russia," with 3 employees forced to resign. What about all the other phony stories they do? FAKE NEWS!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 27, 2017

Given the stakes, reporting on these matters should be done with the greatest care. As this long line of embarrassments, retractions, and falsehoods demonstrates, the exact opposite mentality has driven media behavior over the last year.

Correction: June 27, 2017, 1:03 p.m.
An earlier version of the article incorrectly stated that Slate is owned by the Washington Post company. It’s owned by Graham Holdings, which owned the Washington Post until Jeff Bezos bought it in 2013. Graham Holdings held onto Slate during the sale.

Clarification: June 28, 2017, 9:03 a.m.

The article was edited to clarify that it was media outlets such as Fortune (and not C-SPAN) that falsely claimed that C-SPAN was hacked by RT, causing C-SPAN to make clear it did not know the cause of the interruption.

Top photo: CNN headquarters in downtown Atlanta.

The post CNN Journalists Resign: Latest Example of Media Recklessness on the Russia Threat appeared first on The Intercept.