Yet it would later come out that someone wasn’t being honest about the dossier to the New York Times. The paper ran another “blockbuster” story in May 2018 about the FBI’s Trump investigation, which was code-named Crossfire Hurricane. The Times reported that “Only in mid-September, congressional investigators say, did [the dossier] reach the Crossfire Hurricane team.” This was false. Bruce Ohr would later testify under oath that he told everyone about the dossier—and its provenance—not long after Steele handed it to him in late July. As of this writing, the Times has never updated or corrected that piece.
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The willingness to be spoon-fed is meanwhile what drove the many big press bloopers of the period. Reporters are only human and they make mistakes, but usually they are small things that are the result of sloppiness or speed. These errors were something different. Their entire premises were wrong.
Were there a Collusion Press-Error Hall of Fame, CNN would be the first inductee. There was CNN’s decision in 2017 to run a story, based on one unnamed source, claiming a presidential adviser, Anthony Scaramucci, was under investigation for his ties with a Russian investment fund. CNN had to retract the story, and offered an apology to Scaramucci. Three of CNN’s journalists resigned.
In December 2017, CNN announced a scoop for the ages. It claimed it had evidence that Donald Trump Jr. had been offered by e-mail advance access to hacked Democratic e-mails. MSNBC and CBS also claimed to have “confirmed” this evidence that the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks had been colluding over the hacked e-mails. It later came out that the CNN and MSNBC sources had gotten the date on their evidence wrong. Trump Jr. had been sent an e-mail directing him to look at the WikiLeaks dump—after WikiLeaks had made it public.
Or there was the July 2018 CNN report that one-time Trump attorney Michael Cohen was going to tell Mueller that Trump knew in advance about that infamous Don Jr. meeting at Trump Tower with Veselnitskaya. This would have made President Trump a liar, as he had already claimed no advance knowledge. CNN claimed that one of Cohen’s attorneys, Lanny Davis, had declined to comment. Only, whoops! Turns out one of CNN’s sources was Lanny Davis. Davis then admitted that he’d been mistaken about his information. CNN refused to retract the piece, claiming it was confident in its other sources. Yet the Mueller report never claimed that Trump Sr. knew about the meeting.
Also don’t forget BuzzFeed’s epic “news” in January 2019 that President Trump personally directed his longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about the Trump Tower project in Moscow, in order to obscure his involvement. Several politicians seized on this to hammer Trump. Schiff promised to do what was “necessary” to find out if the president had committed “perjury.” Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy called on Mueller to immediately inform Congress. Democratic Representative Joaquin Castro said that if the allegations were true, Trump “must resign.” The problem? They weren’t. This one was such an invention that the Mueller team made a rare statement, outright denying the BuzzFeed report.
There were plenty more. The Washington Post claimed Russians had accessed the U.S. electrical grid through a Vermont utility. Not true. Slate claimed a Trump server had been communicating with Russia. Not true. The Guardian claimed that Paul Manafort had visited Julian Assange in his hideout at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London—not once, not twice, but three times. If so, Mueller missed it.
Aside from occasional scandals of reporters deliberately fabricating stories in order to advance themselves, nothing in recent years compares to this level and frequency of misinformation. The press gets furious when Trump talks about its “fake news.” But what else would you call it?
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Another low of the past few years has been the media’s willingness to run fact-free accusations. Case in point: claims from the dossier. The specific charges in that document have never been proven. As I noted earlier, Fusion GPS was clever in that it fed the document first to the FBI, to give it more credibility with the press. But the fact the FBI had it, or that Representative Adam Schiff quoted from it in public, didn’t release the press from a basic obligation: to either verify the truth or treat the document for what it was—slander. Instead, the media repeated the dossier’s claims (Carter Page met with shady Russians, etc.) ad nauseum, barely bothering to note that they had not been proven.
This willingness to cast aside facts in favor of theory is what fed three years of hysterical collusion conspiracy theories. By embracing hypotheticals (rather than tracking down facts), the press indulged in endless “connect the dots” exercises. Liberal opinion writers were even worse. One of my all-time, laugh-out-loud headlines from 2018 came from Jonathan Chait, writing in New York magazine. It read: “Prump-Tutin: Will Trump Be Meeting with His Counterpart—Or His Handler?” Chait asked: “What if Trump has been a Russian asset from 1987?” Then followed thousands of words that purported to tie together Trump, obscure Russians, Stormy Daniels, Julian Assange, and so much more. The story, suffice it to say, did not age well.
The dossier was the example of a dirty new trick the press would employ anytime it wanted to spew out unfounded claims. It would write (accurately!) about the “process” rather than the (inaccurate!) substance, using an FBI tip as an excuse to run unproven claims. For instance, in January 2018, two McClatchy reporters ran the following headline: “FBI Investigating Whether Russian Money Went to NRA to Help Trump.” The story cited only two unnamed “sources familiar with the matter.” The article admitted it “could not be learned” whether the FBI had any actual evidence involving the NRA. What mattered was only that the FBI was “investigating it.” Other media outlets followed, and congressional Democrats started demanding that the NRA account for itself. The NRA flatly denied the slur (and no evidence of this claim was ever found).
The same two reporters in April 2018 would cite “sources” who said, “Mueller has evidence [Michael] Cohen was in Prague in 2016, confirming part of dossier.” The story claimed Cohen had secretly snuck into the Czech Republic, through Germany, presumably for a clandestine meeting with Kremlin officials. It again quoted only “sources familiar with the matter.” Yet Cohen had vehemently insisted he’d never been there. And the Mueller report would later flatly say he had not. McClatchy as of the writing of this book still hasn’t retracted the story. Why? It claims that what it was reporting was that Mueller had “received evidence,” and it noted that Mueller never said he didn’t receive evidence. See?
Things were just as standard-free in the Kavanaugh battle. First came the smear stories questioning whether Kavanaugh had known about Judge Alex Kozinski’s dealing with women twenty-seven years earlier. The stories were wild speculation and based on a memo from a radical leftist organization. The press then went crazy with Blasey Ford’s accusations, despite the fact she had no proof.
And yet some newspapers seemed always able to rediscover their standards when it came to Democrats. In early 2019, Virginia Democrats were rocked by a claim by a woman who said Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax had sexually assaulted her in 2004. It later came out the woman had approached the Washington Post with her claims more than a year earlier, but the Post had chosen not to run her story. The newspaper would later explain that it did not publish because its reporters could not find anyone to “corroborate the woman’s account.” If only that had been the Post’s standard with Kavanaugh.
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Finally: sourcing. Journalists don’t just have an obligation to have quality sources; they have an obligation to cite them correctly. It’s the only way the reading public can itself get a sense of the worth or motivation of the source. An accusation coming from a “career intelligence operative” will be viewed by a reader with far more weight than the same accusation coming from a “congressional Democrat.”
Journalists know this, which is why we have the new fad of obscuring sources to the point of uselessness. Exhibit A was the lead paragraph of a New York Times story on April 3, 2019. It came in the wake of Barr’s summa
ry about the Mueller report, just as Barr was about to testify in front of Congress. It read: “Some of Robert S. Mueller III’s investigators have told associates that Attorney General William P. Barr failed to adequately portray the findings of their inquiry and that they were more troubling for Mr. Trump than Mr. Barr indicated, according to government officials and others familiar with their simmering frustrations.”
Let’s unpack this. Apparently, “some” of Mueller’s “investigators” told “associates” of their thoughts. How many is “some”? Mueller had a team of dozens upon dozens. Was it two? Or twenty? And who are the investigators? Were they lead attorneys? Or were they the guy tasked with doing a LexisNexis search? And who are the “associates”? Other people on Mueller’s team? Old friends from college? As for those “government officials,” which branch are they in? Were they part of the administration? Or were they…the partisan Adam Schiff? And also, what the heck is an “other”? A reporter? A former official? Someone’s mother?
The point is that with such vagueness, it would be entirely possible to craft another, totally plausible lead. Something like: “A couple of extreme partisans on Mueller’s team really dislike Barr, and they told Comey, Brennan, and the boys at Fusion GPS that they were unhappy, and those people told us here at the New York Times.” Doesn’t exactly pack the same punch, now does it?
Pro tip: Anytime a reporter is broadly citing a “government official,” a “U.S. official,” or an “American official,” it is probably because that reporter is hiding a bias. Reporters do at times need to fuzzy up the specific job of a source. If as a reporter you were to acknowledge that your source was, say, one of three appointed officials in a department—you’d probably be blowing someone’s cover. But enlarging a source universe to all of Washington is problematic.
So is willingly using sources who have axes to grind and not alerting readers to their motivation. This was a particular problem in the Russia story, thanks to all those “former official” references. Presumably, some of these “former officials” were the very people accused of abusing their FBI-DOJ power—or supporters of those accused. They had everything to gain from crafting a narrative. To quote this crew as an unbiased source of information—as simple “federal officials with knowledge” of matters—is irresponsible. It’s a bit like anonymously quoting Al Capone as an authority on tax law.
Another example: Politico reporter Natasha Bertrand has from start made clear she is closely tied to Fusion GPS. She tweets about Fusion a lot and sometimes quotes a “source close to” the organization. In the spring of 2019, as DOJ inspector general Michael Horowitz prepared to issue his report on the FBI’s 2016 Trump-Russia actions, Bertrand ran a story headlined: “Post-Mueller Report Likely to Target Russia Dossier Author Steele.” It was partly a hit job on Horowitz—who has a sterling reputation in Washington. It quoted “several people interviewed by the Inspector General’s office,” including “former U.S. officials.” These vague former officials were “skeptical about the quality of his probe.” According to the anonymous cites, Horowitz wasn’t “well-versed” in basic DOJ things like FISA warrants. Which is hilarious, given that Horowitz had at this point been the DOJ inspector general for seven years. The story also presented Steele in the best possible light. For an unknowledgeable reader, the piece might throw shade on the inspector general. For well-versed reporters and readers, the story read like a blatant favor to the Fusion crowd.
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All reporters sometimes bend a rule; they obscure a source more than normal or go out further on a limb. But the important thing is that they usually do this in aid of getting truth to the public. What defined the media breakdown that started in 2016 was their destruction of standards in aid of peddling a fiction—the Trump-Russia collusion narrative. Think how far we have come from the days of Walter Cronkite’s sign-off: “And that’s the way it is.” Today’s “news” is instead about the way reporters “want it to be.” Trust lost is not easily regained. The country needs a fair and balanced press; post-Trump, how does the industry ever gain that trust back?
Conclusion
For every Resistance leader who daily makes an inflated claim about Trump’s destruction of democracy, there is a more quiet, average American who is deeply alarmed by the legitimate and lasting harm this movement is causing. When I go out on the road to do reporting or to give speeches, the most frequent question I am asked by this silent majority is: What can be done?
As with everything with politics, that’s a hard one. The reality is that so long as Trump is president, the Resistance will continue. This puts a lot of 2020 voters in a difficult position. We’d like elections to be solely about policy. But with Trump, it is inevitably about the person. Many voters, even those who approve of Trump’s agenda, are tired of the circus and tempted to bring it to an end by voting Trump out of office. Just as many are worried that a Trump defeat in 2020 will prove a vindication of the Resistance tactics and legitimize more such behavior going forward. None of this is about the issues, but it is a reality.
Some of the Resistance behavior of recent years requires a legislative or administrative response. Congress needs to revisit its surveillance laws, to make it harder for intelligence officials to misuse them for political purposes. It needs to clarify that law enforcement must notify it of sensitive investigations, so that lawmakers can ensure agencies are not abusing their powers. And it needs to consider abolishing the FISA court, which is a tool that elected and appointed leaders use to dodge accountability for their own actions.
The Department of Justice needs to reinforce its regulations and develop a better system for holding accountable employees who break the rules. Its leadership needs to re-instill in prosecutors and FBI agents the principle that the law isn’t solely about throwing people in jail; it’s about wielding powers with humility and also protecting the innocent. The legislative and executive branches need to work together to reform civil service laws and restore to the bureaucracy a merit-based system—in which those who perform admirably are rewarded, while those who misuse their positions are disciplined or fired. The Supreme Court needs to send some serious rebukes to the lower courts, to get judges back in line.
But what about the politicians who act out of bounds? What to do about them? There is an answer—for both the short and the long term. It isn’t immediate, and it won’t satisfy the impatient. But it does rest on a tried-and-true American trait: engagement.
American consumers are among the most picky, demanding, and irascible in the world—a national characteristic for which I have nothing but admiration. As a young adult, I lived in England. Nothing drove me crazier than the resigned attitude the Brits had to poor service. Their National Health Service treats average people with benign neglect, yet the citizenry is too used to this injustice to rebel. Service providers abuse their customers and consumers complain endlessly about the treatment, but they don’t do anything about it.
Americans are the opposite. If they don’t like a doctor, they get a second, third, or fourth opinion. Generations of Americans still scrutinize their diner bill down to the last penny and put serious thought into what percentage (if any at all) to tip a waitress. If a car dealer sells an American a lemon, you can bet that American will show up every day until he or she gets a fix. And while I have real issues with many class-action lawsuits, they are nonetheless another expression of American insistence on accountability.
Part of this is because the pocketbook remains king in our country, and that’s a good thing. We care deeply when someone sells us a bum toaster or overcharges for gutter cleaning, or when an employee takes advantage and doesn’t show up for work. These hurt our bottom line, and we feel it.
Politics is easier to ignore, since it is removed from our day-to-day. And people fear they are just one voice among many. But accountability works the same way. For too many Americans, politics is something we gripe about at night after the news program and vote on occasionally. A functioning civil societ
y needs a much higher level of engagement. We need to be just as picky and just as demanding about our political outcomes as we are about our toaster, gutters, and employees.
A lot of Americans look at the federal government and feel it is a lost cause. It is so far away, so removed from everyday life. And in some ways that is true. Which is why I always remind people to start at the place the Founders intended them to start: locally. Do you know who sits on your school board? Do you know who your mayor is? Do you know who your state House representative or senator is? Find out. Find out what they are pushing. Go to the meetings, write letters, attend town halls, and hold them to account.
This engagement in local politics matters—it gives you more control over how your kid is educated, how often the trash is picked up, and how your property tax dollars are used. But it does also play into national politics. Local leaders are the farm team for higher office. The more they are expected by their constituents at lower levels to respond to demands, the more responsive they will be as they move up the ranks. Too many Americans put untested and unproven candidates into positions of serious consequence. And we are witnessing what happens when the unserious are allowed to run the country.
Resistance (At All Costs) Page 23
