They finally have something potentially worse than Watergate, but this time around they’re content helping Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, and Colson get away with it.
That’s if you accept the most generous interpretation of the media’s near-total blackout of revelations from Special Counsel John Durham’s probe into Democrats’ misconduct. Durham’s newest filing accuses the Hillary Clinton campaign of working with a technology firm that was collecting Internet data from Trump Tower servers, and subsequently the White House, as a means of creating an “inference” and “narrative” about Trump’s dealing with Russia. In layman’s terms, they were framing the president. (Margot Cleveland has a good rundown, here.)
So where’s the front-page coverage? Virtually nowhere in the mainstream press, it seems. Remember, there were teams of reporters on the Robert Mueller beat.
All of this is related to the case against Michael Sussmann, Clinton’s lawyer, who is under investigation in connection with pushing the deceptive Alfa Bank story — one of the early Russia-collusion freak-outs, in which Trump was accused of establishing secret communications with a Russian bank — and bringing it to the FBI and CIA allegedly without disclosing his clients. (He’s pleaded not guilty.) We now know that the Russia-collusion hysteria was predicated on evidence that had been cooked up by lawyers and campaign operatives and then repackaged as journalism either by dupes or complicit reporters.
Slate, after a number of other outlets passed on the story, dropped the Alfa Bank story late afternoon on Oct. 31, a week before the election. By early evening, the entirety of social media and every major media organization (including the ones that didn’t bite) was all over it — as was candidate Hillary Clinton:
It’s time for Trump to answer serious questions about his ties to Russia. https://t.co/D8oSmyVAR4 pic.twitter.com/07dRyEmPjX
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) October 31, 2016
(Considering her unethical history, you really have to wonder what Clinton knew about all of this.)
A week later, Trump’s victory set off a seismic shock in D.C. From that moment, political media would run with virtually any crackpot Trump–Russia theory fed to them by Democrats. They broke every journalistic ethical boundary imaginable over the next four years.
There is something perilously inadequate, at best, about political media that can obsess over a comedian’s podcast — with the intention of shutting him down for thought-crimes — but lacks the bandwidth to report on allegations from a special prosecutor that a major political party was involved in spying on private servers of a presidential candidate, and then his administration. Even when establishment outlets get around to covering the story, it will almost surely be to give cover rather than bring light. If you were still naïve enough to believe that major outlets had merely been duped by operatives, rather than serving as accomplices, the way they’ve reacted to these new revelations should dissuade you of that notion for good.