A Washington Post story about Devin Nunes stepping down as chairman of the investigation into whether Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential campaign and whether the Obama administration asked U.S. intelligence agencies to surveil Trump’s associates in order to leak potentially compromising information to the liberal press reveals the take of the left-leaning media in the ongoing story. Those supposed news outlets tried to create the perception that Nunes’ temporary recusal means that a potential criminal act by Obama’s national security advisor, Susan Rice, in unmasking the identities of American citizens who were inadvertently spied upon by U.S. intelligence agencies, with the information later leaked by someone to media hostile to Donald Trump, was much ado about nothing.
“Nunes is out of the Russian probe, and the Susan Rice spin collapses,” was how the Post chose to “report” the story. (Emphasis added.) Note it was not former Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice who was “spinning,” according to the story, with her denials of doing anything wrong despite admissions of doing the unmasking (which is against the law unless done when an American is under investigation or needs U.S. protection). The “spinning” was instead perpetrated by “right-wing media.”
The New York Times also revealed its leftist bias with its headline: “Trump, Citing No Evidence, Suggests Susan Rice Committed Crime.” (Emphasis added.) Again, Rice admitted to unmasking Trump personnel without a warrant, but the news organs claim there is no evidence that Rice did anything wrong.
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The absolute lack of investigative rigor by the liberal mainstream media is amazing, but not surprising. It has been recognized for many years that such liberal “news sources” are not objective, despite claiming that they are, but are rather cheerleaders for every liberal politician and the latest progressive cause.
To recap, the Democratic Party mantra, wholly supported by its allies in the press, is that the Trump campaign conspired with the Russian government to hack into Democratic National Committee (DNC) computers and Clinton campaign computers, with embarrassing information found therein dumped into the public by Wikileaks. This claim has all the earmarks of being a diversionary tactic, meant to shunt public scrutiny away from damaging information found on Democratic Party computers that revealed that the DNC was in the tank for Hillary Clinton, and was determined to thwart the insurgent campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders, the independent socialist from Vermont. Not only has the claim against Trump not been found to have any basis in fact, WikiLeaks, which has heretofore shown no bias either for or against the two main U.S. political parties, denied getting anything from the Russians. Yet the major media have claimed and insinuated over and over again that the Trump campaign colluded with Vladimir Putin and the Russians to hack the Democrats.
Since the first time Hillary Clinton made the initial claim of collusion, no evidence has surfaced to prove this assertion. If it had, it would be all over MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS, and of course, the New York Times and the Washington Post. Ari Fleischer, who was the press secretary for President George W. Bush and is hardly a Trump apologist, tweeted that he thought it was noteworthy that the Obama White House (Rice worked directly for Obama, not for an intelligence agency) was “unmasking” Trump officials.
The NSA is in the business in spying on foreigners. By law, however, the NSA is supposed to keep the identities of any Americans caught up in any such probes secret. But as former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova said, “What was produced by the intelligence community at the request of Rice were detailed spreadsheets of intercepted phone calls with unmasked Trump associates.” There was nothing illegal about what these Trump associates was doing, yet Rice asked for their names to be “unmasked.” Why? Apparently, the left-wing media does not care.
Then, somehow, the names of Trump’s associates were disseminated to anti-Trump media and used for political purposes to smear the Trump administration. Again, the major media are unconcerned as to who did this, or why it was done.
And considering that Rice had only one boss above her in the U.S government — President Barack Obama — this raises an interesting question: Did Obama either know about or authorize this unmasking, or even suggest or order it? Rice, in her position as national security advisor, had daily access to the president. She was known as his “right-hand woman.” Her relationship to him was characterized as “like a sister.”
Shouldn’t the media at least have some curiosity about what Obama knew and when he knew it?
Apparently not. Instead the media continues, like pit bull dogs, to pursue the story of Trump’s alleged “collusion” with the Russians. But as Town Hall has said, “Well, this isn’t good for the liberal narrative that Trump might have colluded with Russia. They’re waiting like kids on Christmas for the smoking gun — that the Trump team did collude with Russian intelligence to sink Hillary Clinton — to be unveiled. There is zero evidence to prove this, kids.”
Yet, even now the left-wing media waits with bated breath for any news of a Russia/Trump connection. Taken as a whole, the media’s seeming lapse in judgment in these two stories either reflects the lack of any journalistic IQ amongst members of the media, or it reflects such gross political bias by the media’s reporters and editors that all political reporting done by those organs should be considered mere propaganda, nothing more.
Since the folks at CNN have not just been unconcerned about the Susan Rice scandal, but have taken on the role of defender of Rice and the Obama White House, with a string of “reporters” downplaying the story, the left-wing reporting could probably be safely deemed propaganda. CNN has gone so far as to call the whole story with Rice as nothing more than a “fake scandal ginned up by right-wing media and Trump.” Don Lemon led off CNN Tonight saying, “On this program tonight, we will not insult your intelligence by pretending” the story was legitimate. “Nor will we aid and abet the people trying to misinform you, the American people, by creating a diversion. Not going to do it.”
CNN’s chief national security correspondent, Jim Sciutto, was just as adamant, calling it a non-story created to distract from the story of Trump’s tweet that Trump Tower was “wiretapped.” (Obviously, Trump meant the Obama administration was surveilling his incoming Trump team, not that Barack Obama personally waltzed into Trump Tower with surveillance equipment and installed it). But Sciutto told Anderson Cooper, “Again, to senior intelligence officials who work for both Democrats and Republicans, this appears to be a story, largely ginned up, partly as a distraction from this larger investigation [about the Russians allegedly interfering in the election],” adding that “someone close to Ambassador Rice” said that such unmasking was “not unusual.” That is not surprising that someone “close” to Rice would defend her. What is amazing is that a supposed journalist would take such a defense as conclusive.
Sciutto even defended Rice on her claim that she did not even know about the unmasking — when she was the person who was directing it! “From her perspective,” Sciutto lectured, “she didn’t know what specific unmasking Devin Nunes and others are talking about, in part because that is something she asks — or asked during the regular course of her work as national security adviser.”
Just who is Jim Sciutto? Well, he actually worked for the State Department (where Rice worked, at the same time) between 2011 and 2013! But this important piece of information was not divulged by Sciutto, nor was it mentioned by Cooper. Not important to these “investigative” reporters.
Chris Cuomo (another well-known Democrat employed at CNN as a “journalist”) dismissed the whole story as a right-wing conspiracy theory.
But it was not just CNN, of course. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews (who at one time was an aide to Democrat Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill) said the attack upon Rice was just racist and sexist.
Rather than operate as the Democratic Party hacks they are, what if these news “hounds” instead functioned as the journalists they pretend to be? What questions would they ask, and what avenues would they pursue?
For example, all requests for unmasking must be approved by the NSA. Then, only the requester can view the material. If that is the case, just how did this material get from the hands of Susan Rice into the hands not just of the media, but media hostile to the Trump administration?
One would think that this is a question the media might be interested in pursuing — if they were honest journalists.
The Washington Post bluntly reported, “No evidence of impropriety exists and no evidence ties Rice to the leaking of Michael T. Flynn’s name.” (Flynn was Trump’s initial pick for director of national intelligence until it was revealed that he had talked to some Russians before the inauguration. While Flynn has not been charged with any crime, he stepped down after he apparently misled Vice President Pence about having spoken with some Russian officials). If it is true that Rice had nothing to do with the unmasking of Flynn, one would think that the Post would be curious as to who did. After all, whether Rice did it, or someone else with access to intelligence information did it, the fact remains it was done. And that is a crime.
Without a shred of evidence, the Post states as a fact that there were “Russian efforts to manipulate our election process,” and that there was potential “coordination with the campaign of the beneficiary of Russia’s active measures.” Yet, when it comes to Rice’s handling of raw intelligence that somehow ended up in the press, they are unconcerned.
They also have little concern for the privacy of American citizens. What does concern the Post is that all of these accusations might hurt the intelligence community! They quote Jack Goldsmith and Benjamin Wittes of Lawfareblog: “If the President and the House Intelligence Committee chairman are not merely defending the intelligence community but are actively raising questions about its integrity,” then it will become very difficult for “our intelligence community to operate within a democratic government.”
In an interview with a sympathetic MSNBC, Rice denied Trump’s accusation that she had committed the crime of leaking the name of any American caught in a surveillance operation of foreigners. “I leaked nothing to nobody, and never have and never would.”
Setting aside her poor grammar, just how reliable is Rice? It must be remembered that it was Susan Rice who told multiple TV news shows that the attacks of September 11, 2012 were the spontaneous reaction of a mob in Benghazi to a months-old YouTube video, when it was already known that it was a coordinated terrorist attack.
Perhaps MSNBC, CNN, the Washington Post, and the New York Times could point that out in assessing the credibility of Susan Rice.
But of course, they won’t.
