The Russiagate Whitewash Era Begins
After the WMD mess, Judith Miller got the blame, while a long list of just-as-guilty media villains failed upward. Now, a nervous press is looking for Russiagate's fall guys
“There is an old saying in journalism: You’re only as good as your sources,” wrote Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler, in a piece about the indictment of “Steele Dossier” source Igor Danchenko. The latter is being set up to take the rap as the dirty Russian rat who hoodwinked poor civic-minded Christopher Steele, the FBI, and the entire American press corps into propping up the biggest hoax since the WMD affair.
After America invaded Iraq and failed to turn up weapons of mass destruction, the press went into CYA mode. Pundits who’d panted for war now cooked up a new narrative, that the WMD “mistake” had been caused by a combination of faulty intelligence, over-confident officials in the George W. Bush White House, and one New York Times writer named Judith Miller. Everyone else who so forcefully screwed the pooch on that story, from New Yorker editor David Remnick to New York columnist Jonathan Chait to current Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, emerged either unscathed, or draped in awards and promoted.
Now, the Russiagate tale many of those same people hyped is falling apart, and the industry is again building battlements to protect careers from a cascade of humiliating revelations. This time, a combination of Danchenko, Buzzfeed editor Ben Smith, and perhaps a few organizations like McClatchy will be tossed out of the lifeboat. If you’re ever tempted to think there’s honor among thieves, check out this recent flurry of Russiagate finger-pointing.
Last weekend, Meet The Press host Chuck Todd — himself one of the biggest traffickers in Russiagate hokum — interrogated California congressman Adam Schiff, who based bombshell, nationally televised hearings in March of 2020 around the Steele information. “As chair of the House Intelligence Committee,” Todd asked, “do you regret giving some credibility to the Steele dossier before anyone had any chance to verify anything in that?”
Schiff answered that he didn’t regret listening to someone who “frankly, was a well-respected British intelligence officer.” He added, “We couldn’t have known years ago that we would learn years later that someone who was a primary source lied to him.”
In asking the question, Todd interjected, “Look, there are some news organizations that made the mistake of publishing this dossier without verifying it, and that’s a separate conversation for those news organizations.”
Todd was referring to Buzzfeed, whose editor Ben Smith published the dossier in full on January 10, 2017, so that “Americans can make up their own minds” about its allegations. Kessler in his piece also pointed a finger at Smith, noting that his publishing decision was “controversial,” though he “steadfastly defended that move.”
Meanwhile, the New York Times on Monday published a guest essay by former Columbia Journalism School Dean Bill Grueskin, entitled, “How Did So Much of the Media Get the Steele Dossier So Wrong?” Grueskin, too, led off by pointing at Buzzfeed. Not mentioning that the Columbia Journalism Review once published a story called “Buzzfeed vindicated over Steele dossier,” a piece that said Todd’s decision to dismiss the dossier as “fake news” was “not his finest hour,” Grueskin piled on Buzzfeed:
Sure, the memo provided little hard evidence or specific detail, but, BuzzFeed said, it had “circulated at the highest levels of the U.S. government” and had “acquired a kind of legendary status among journalists, lawmakers and intelligence officials.” This, along with tantalizing tidbits like “Source A confided” or “confirmed by Source E,” gave it a patina of authenticity…
Grueskin then listed a slew of reasons press figures chased Russiagate/Steele phantoms. First, “Mr. Trump had long curried Mr. Putin’s favor.” Second, “the Russians interfered… to foment dissent and unrest.” Third, “Trump’s choice of Paul Manafort to serve as his campaign chairman reinforced the idea that he was in the thrall of Russia.” Fourth: “Many of the denials came from confirmed liars… When a well-known liar tells you that something is false, the instinct is to believe that it might well be true.” Fifth: “Some reporters simply didn’t like or trust Mr. Trump or didn’t want to appear to be on his side.”
No big deal, just an Ivy League J-school Dean offering excuse after excuse for reporters who couldn’t bring themselves to tell the truth during the biggest scandal of the Trump years, because they “didn’t want to appear to be on his side.” He should be saying any journalist who’s too afraid of peer pressure to do his or her job should go into a new line of work. Apparently, Dean Grueskin favors a more forgiving approach to ethics.
Kessler also offered a load of excuses, noting the Steele screwup was not so important anyway, being just a “side show” to the real story of Russian interference. Also, he insisted, other people made the big mistakes: Buzzfeed made the initial decision to publish the dossier, and it was “cable news shows” as well as “Democrats in congressional hearings” (read: Schiff) who “eagerly” discussed it.
The Danchenko indictment appeared to blow up the long-believed notion that former Russian-American Chamber of Commerce chief Sergei Millian was a source for the dossier. Kessler noted that the Washington Post twice reported on Millian in conjunction with the dossier, in 2017 and 2019, but recently admitted its error and corrected and updated both stories. So that was that. Moving on, Kessler concluded “the Steele dossier has raised uncomfortable questions in media circles about whether [emphasis mine] some news organizations and TV pundits too quickly embraced sketchy opposition research.” He wrote three more paragraphs about Smith and Buzzfeed before ending his piece.
So much sleaze, where to begin? For one, there’s Kessler’s contention that the Steele dossier was a “side show” to the “main event,” i.e. “the Russian government’s efforts to intervene in the 2016 election on the side of Donald Trump.”
This is just a lie, flat-out. The press corps (and especially the Washington Post, which played a key role) didn’t keep Russia on the front pages for years because of “interference.” Papers like the Post and the New York Times instead humped the leg of the Trump-Russia investigation as part of a broad, implied promise to deliver proof of conspiracy that would end Trump’s presidency prematurely. Remember the surreptitiously taped New York Times town hall, in which editor Dean Baquet explained what went wrong when they “built our newsroom to cover one story,” meaning Russiagate?
The day Bob Mueller walked off that witness stand, two things happened. Our readers who want Donald Trump to go away suddenly thought, “Holy shit, Bob Mueller is not going to do it…” I think that the story changed… We’re a little tiny bit flat-footed.
The Post, the Times, and everyone else was feeding Russiagate stories to “readers who want Donald Trump to go away,” not “readers who are angry about Russian interference.” This they accomplished by selling and re-selling a narrative about a Watergate-style, presidency-wrecking conspiracy that would soon be uncovered, by the fearless press.
If Kessler and the Post think correcting two stories about Sergei Millian will get them off the hook for years of this, they’re… well, they’re probably right, but they’re still assholes. In both the news section and in the op-ed pages the Post published dozens of stories, if not hundreds — I lose count quickly — that were either directly or indirectly pegged to Steele material, and clearly designed to stoke reader interest in the wider conspiracy tale.
From “Real or ‘fake news’? Either way, allegations of lewd tape pose challenge for Trump,” to “Comey says Trump ‘morally unfit to be president,’ possibly susceptible to Russian blackmail,” to “More evidence of Trump’s subservience to Putin — and we still don’t know why,” to “If Putin has kompromat on Trump, how might he use it?” to “The unanswered question of our time: Is Trump an agent of Russia?” to the hilarious “18 Reasons Trump Could Be a Russian Asset,” to “Michael Cohen’s visiting Prague would be a huge development in the Russia investigation,” to “FBI obtained FISA warrant to monitor former Trump adviser Carter Page,” to countless others, the Post relentlessly played up core allegations of the Steele reports.
They even won the Pulitzer Prize for a package of articles that included, “FBI once planned to pay former British spy who authored controversial Trump dossier,” a story whose big hook was that it boosted Steele’s bona fides. The piece detailed how the FBI at one point offered to pay Steele for his services:
While Trump has derided the dossier as “fake news” compiled by his political opponents, the FBI’s arrangement with Steele shows that the bureau considered him credible and found his information, while unproved, to be worthy of further investigation.
Of course we now know the FBI had doubts about Steele’s work as early as October 2016, when among other things a State Department official who interviewed him pointed out errors in his reports (like the absence of a Russian consulate in Miami) to senior FBI personnel. The FBI also dropped him as a source for talking to the media. But the Post won the Pulitzer Prize for reporting that the FBI “considered him credible” in that time frame.
The Washington Post won a Pulitzer Prize for humping a hoaxKessler and the Post may think that apart from two stories about Sergei Millian, they covered Russiagate in a way that counts as coloring within the lines, but they’re not fooling anyone. A classic example is the aforementioned “Comey says Trump is morally unfit” story, which contained this passage:
Comey detailed in the interview Trump’s fixation on unproven allegations that he watched prostitutes urinate on one another in a Moscow hotel in 2013, asserting that Trump at one point said he was contemplating ordering Comey to investigate and disprove the incident because he did not want “even a 1 percent chance” that his wife, first lady Melania Trump, would believe it happened.
Comey said that struck him as odd. “I remember thinking, ‘How could your wife think there’s a 1 percent chance you were with prostitutes peeing on each other in Moscow?’ ” he said, adding that his assessment was it’s possible Trump is guilty of the accusation.
Technically, it’s kosher: the Post was merely reporting what a former high-ranking official thought about the pee tape tory. However, that story was published in April, 2018. We know now the FBI by March, 2017 had interviewed the “primary sub-source” for the pee story, i.e. Danchenko, who characterized it to them as “word of mouth and hearsay,” a “conversation that [he/she] had with friends over beers,” made in “jest,” to be taken with a “grain of salt.” Comey in other words knew the pee tape story was totally unreliable, but kept quiet about it in his much-celebrated testimony before Schiff’s committee, on his book tour, and in interviews with outlets like the Post, straight through to the present.
In the best case scenario, Comey used the Post to sell mass audiences a big lie, but we don’t hear the likes of Kessler wailing about it, because papers like the Post were so obviously in on the scam.
They will point fingers at Igor Danchenko now, and mouth old saws about reporters only being as good as their sources, but where’s that folk wisdom when it comes to the likes of Comey? For that matter, what about their own ex-spook contributors like John Sipher, or whatever “law enforcement and other U.S. officials” put them on the trail of, say, the Carter Page FISA warrant story, which they know is wrong (see their own “Justice Dept. concedes it had ‘insufficient’ cause to continue monitoring former Trump campaign adviser in Russia probe” from last year)?
Papers like the Post and Times merely offered a fresh take on a trick I wrote about back in 2004, when the Times published a front-page story (“The Mystery of the Bulge in the Jacket”) about a goofball internet rumor of George W. Bush using a secret transmitter during a debate with John Kerry. “Reporting the controversy” has always been an end-run around traditional fact-checking rules, yet news outlets are now being complimented for using the technique over and over with the Steele reports.
Grueskin said “many journalists did show restraint.” And indeed, in the days after Buzzfeed published the dossier, the Times for instance did technically check a lot of “restraint” boxes, being careful for instance to note in headlines that the Steele material was “unsubstantiated.”
Look down in the body of the pieces, though, and you saw they were really just engaged in a steroid-fueled version of “reporting the controversy.” You’d read things like, “The memos suggest that for many years, the Russian government… looked for ways to influence Mr. Trump,” or “If some of the unproven claims in the memos are merely titillating, others would amount to extremely serious, potentially treasonous acts.” Then, at intervals, they’d basically say, “allegedly.”
Of course the Times went further, with stories like “Russia’s Sexual Blackmail Didn’t Die With The Soviets.” This was an offbeat, seemingly harmless historical piece outlining Russia’s history of sexual kompromat, and it was technically correct. However, in the context of Buzzfeed’s publication of the Steele reports, that story clearly burnished the idea that the “pee tape” was real. As in, “We can’t confirm the FSB filmed Trump cavorting with peeing prostitutes. But if we could confirm it, here’s some background that would be relevant.” Who doesn’t see through this?
They knew exactly what they were doing then, and they know what they’re doing now, in trying to dump years of manipulation on the likes of Danchenko and Ben Smith. Don’t be fooled. They were all guilty, and as we’re seeing now, they’ll sell out anyone to avoid admitting it.