You may recall that the “paper of record” was all over the “Trump-Russia collusion” narrative early last year, filing several “bombshell” reports claiming that various members of President Donald J. Trump’s campaign, as well as the candidate himself, were involved in some nefarious plot with Moscow to “steal the election” from Hillary Clinton.
Central to this narrative early on was Carter Page, called a “foreign policy advisor” by the Times in an April 2017 story that claimed a June 2016 visit by Page to Moscow served as “a catalyst for the F.B.I. investigation into connections between Russia and President Trump’s campaign.”
That story, “Trump Advisor’s Visit to Moscow Got the F.B.I.’s Attention,” left many Democrats insisting that the “smoking gun” had been found: Trump colluded, here is proof, and so when are the impeachment proceedings going to begin?
Only, that’s about as far as the story went. Page vehemently denied any collusion took place, and in any event, serious intelligence officials noted that the Russian assets far better than Page were in place to have reached out to the Trump campaign if in fact there was ever going to be any collusion.
Fast-forward to New Year’s weekend. The Times ran another lengthy, breathless story intimating that, no, it wasn’t Page who touched off the FBI investigation, it was an even lower-level Trump campaign associate named George Papadopoulos.
The latest story, “How the Russia Inquiry Began: A Campaign Aide, Drinks and Talk of Political Dirt,” claimed that the 28-year-old’s booze-induced blather in an upscale London bar actually triggered the FBI probe.
So which is it, NYTimes? Page or Papadopoulos? (Related: NY Times FAKE NEWS alert: Paper claims ‘Russia Papadopoulos bombshell’ started Russia ‘collusion’ probe, not dossier, but it FALLS APART within HOURS.)
That’s the same question former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy wants to know — though he thinks he knows the answer.
Writing at National Review Online, McCarthy says he believes the Times’ transition from Page to Papadopoulos is part of an effort by the paper to help Democrats cover up the real reason behind the FBI’s probe: The bogus “Trump dossier,” a position shared by a growing number of Republicans in Congress.
“Slowly but surely, it has emerged that the Justice Department and FBI very likely targeted Page because of the Steele dossier, a Clinton-campaign opposition-research screed disguised as intelligence reporting. Increasingly, it appears that the Bureau failed to verify Steele’s allegations before the DOJ used some of them to bolster an application for a spying warrant from the FISA court (i.e., the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court),” he wrote in this week’s column for the magazine.
Lest we forget about who produced the dossier, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, a member of the House Judiciary Committee which is probing alleged Russian collusion, had to say about this in an interview last month with Fox Business’ Lou Dobbs. He not only believes that the dossier was used by the FBI to obtain a FISA surveillance warrant against Team Trump under false pretenses, he believes the bureau paid for part of it.
“Let’s remember a couple of things about the dossier,” Jordan said. “The Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign, which we now know were one and the same, paid the law firm who paid Fusion GPS who paid Christopher Steele who then paid Russians to put together a report that we call a dossier full of all kinds of fake news, National Enquirer garbage and it’s been reported that this dossier was all dressed up by the FBI, taken to the FISA court and presented as a legitimate intelligence document — that it became the basis for a warrant to spy on Americans.”
He added: “There are a couple of fundamental questions here. Did the FBI pay Christopher Steele? I asked that of the Attorney General two weeks ago he wouldn’t answer the question. Did they actually vet this dossier?”
McCarthy doesn’t think so. He believes that senior FBI and Justice Department officials understood the dossier was pure political opposition research but dressed it up as legitimate intelligence in order to snag a FISA warrant. That means the FBI and Justice were completely politicized and then weaponized to spy on a rival campaign.
That is unprecedented and it’s also legally questionable.
Why? Because, as McCarthy explains, it would mean the FBI obtained a FISA warrant without vetting and verifying the contents of the dossier beforehand. Also, it would mean that the Justice Department of a then-incumbent Democratic administration did not tell the FISA court that the dossier was in fact produced by a Democratic presidential campaign for use against a Republican rival.
As for the “failing” New York Times, it is patently clear that the transformation from Page to Papadopoulos as being the catalyst for the FBI’s probe is not only disingenuous (because neither is true), but also clear evidence that the paper is complicit in a Democratic attempt to deflect from the fact that the dossier was bogus, and misused, to attack Team Trump.
J.D. Heyes is a senior writer for NaturalNews.com and NewsTarget.com, as well as editor of The National Sentinel.
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