Rethinking What We Know
Was the FBI intelligence agent arrested in January the one who forced Comey's hand in the 2016 "October Surprise"?
A few weeks ago, a tweet of mine went viral. Well, viral for me. I don’t know how to measure these things. If 20 people like my tweet, and three retweet it, I’m pretty happy. If I buy a promotion, it sometimes rises to 50 likes. And if I get a couple of subscribers out of that, I’m very happy.
But this January 30 tweet has, as of February 15, over 12,000 likes, almost 400,000 views, and 5,400 retweets and quote retweets - most of it from the first three days, though likes and retweets are still coming in. I didn’t promote it at all.
The only thing I can figure is that it hit a sweet spot, that my tweet entered the superhighway of twittereworld just when a lot of people were passing.
But I also think it hit a vein. It expressed something people were thinking, but they are not finding in their social feeds or mainstream media.
This is the tweet:
This was not particularly bold. I was posting an article that had been written by the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch, who had just done an interview on The Reidout on MSNBC.
There were a lot of people who pointed out that other people have been saying this. Seth Abramson came up the most. He is a lawyer who has written three books on Donald Trump that all start with the word Proof… of Conspiracy, of Collusion, of Corruption. I had not heard of him, but he has almost a million twitter followers. And they are very loyal.
I seriously doubt the political reporters at the New York Times are among his followers. If they are, they probably see his books and essays as “editorial” and something they don’t need to worry about, since they do “news.”
It was, in fact, the New York Times that did a “news” piece in 2016 that forms the core of Bunch’s piece, which I amplified.
This all has to do with the “October Surprise” by then-FBI Director James Comey, just a week and a half before the November 8 election, when he revealed that Clinton emails had been found on Huma Abedin’s (or her then-husband Anthony Weiner’s) laptop. It is widely believed - Nate Silver at Five-Thirty-Eight is cited most - that this cost Clinton the election.
This is what Bunch wrote:
It was later reported that Comey was motivated to make the unusual announcement about the laptop because he feared leaks from the FBI’s New York field office, which, according to Reuters, had “a faction of investigators based in the office known to be hostile to Hillary Clinton.”
This is the nut graph of Bunch’s piece:
This week’s stunning corruption charges against a top FBI spymaster who assumed a key role in the bureau’s New York office just weeks before 2016′s “October surprise” — an agent who by 2018 was known to be working for a Vladimir Putin-tied Russian oligarch — should cause America to rethink everything we think we know about the Trump-Russia scandal and how it really happened that Trump won that election.
Let’s summarize: Comey has said in interviews about his book, that the FBI forced his hand in the October Surprise. There had been - in the months since his July 2016 announcement that the bureau had found nothing on Clinton’s emails - a reactivated FBI account that was posting pro-Trump propaganda and leaking “stories” like “corruption at the Clinton Foundation” - stories that were coming directly from Steve Bannon.
Comey had every reason to believe that the New York FBI agents who were posting on this account would, in fact, leak the new info about Abedin’s laptop. There is even an argument being made by election integrity advocate Jennifer Cohn that the FBI had info about Clinton emails shortly after they seized Weiner’s laptop in September - and that the New York office knew about it, and were holding it till just before the election.
The Times was all over this October Surprise story. The entirety of it’s front page on October 29, 2016 was dedicated to it, as Bunch shows in his piece.
But then, Bunch writes, the Times did another story - this one sticking a pin in the ballooning idea that Russia was interfering in the election.
The supposed bombshell — it turned out there was nothing incriminating or particularly new on the laptop — wasn’t the only FBI-related story that boosted Trump in the homestretch of the 2016 campaign. On Oct. 31, citing unnamed “intelligence sources,” the Times reported, “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia.” That article defused a budding scandal about the GOP White House hopeful — at least until after Trump’s shock election on Nov. 8, 2016. In the coming days and weeks, the basis of that Times article would melt, but by then the most unlikely POTUS in U.S. history was ensconced in the Oval Office. (Emphasis mine)
Who were the sources for this story? “Intelligence sources.” Like… the guys in the New York FBI office? Like Charles McGonigal, whose arrest for his Russian ties is the subject of Bunch’s column?
And herein lies the issue - an issue that I’ve been thinking a lot about and will be writing on in coming columns. Journalists rely on “official sources.” But who are the “official sources”? Do they have an agenda? Do they want to skew things one way or another? And - most importantly - why do so many journalists take their official sources as gospel? Why do they not include other voices that might be able to shed a different light on the story?
Let me tell you - they don’t. There are a few of us who want to dig beneath the surface, but we are outliers. Truth is, journalists want the quick story. We are still - and I would argue anachronistically - in competition with other journalists. We know that people remember what they read or hear first, whether it’s true or not.
Former Attorney General Bill Barr proved this when he “leaked” the Mueller Report and totally misrepresented what it said. No matter how many journalists and lawyers who read the report pointed this out, it didn’t matter. Barr had gotten the jump on shaping the story. And that’s what most people in the U.S. still believe. Sadly, that’s what too many journalists still believe.
This, of course, is not the first time the Times has propagated misinformation leaked to them from “inside sources.” Remember Judith Miller, and her insistence, via Lewis (Scooter) Libby, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction? Remember when Valerie Plame’s career was ended, with similar whispers by “insiders” to another journalist, because she was trying to get the truth out that Iraq did not have WMD?
It happens on a local level, too. We’re taught as journalists to not report a story until some sort of official documentation comes out. Like a lawsuit. This leaves the door open for someone filing a frivolous lawsuit and a “journalist” picking it up and quoting it, without regard to truth or context. It happened in Las Vegas, in a story I witnessed. We’ll talk about that next time.