Sussmann, Skripal, Steele: leaks, lies and hollow disclaimers
Inspired by snoopydawg's essay, Botched missions in Salisbury and The Hague, I want to focus attention on false information in the media and the disclaimers that supposedly provide legal cover for journalists and their highly placed leakers.
Jeff Carlson of themarketsworkhas written this week about strategic leaks by attorney Michael Sussmann. Carlson focuses on news articles by Franklin Foer at Slate in the fall of 2016. Foer's first article asserts that the Trump organization and a Russian Bank, Alfa Bank, had an email connection indicating something disguised and nefarious. This was presented and written as a bombshell connecting Trump to Russia with graphs and quotations permeated by technical expertise.
Soon afterward, it became known publicly that there was no such connection and that the traffic being described was hotel marketing of discount offers. You may remember this.
What I want to highlight is that Foer, both in his bombshell and in the retraction soon afterward, made the following statements at the very end of each of his long, extensively misleading articles. In the first, after 32 long paragraphs of insinuation, he covers himself by saying:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/10/was_...
A GROUP OF COMPUTER SCIENTISTS BELIEVES A TRUMP SERVER WAS COMMUNICATING WITH A RUSSIAN BANK
OCT. 31 2016By Franklin Foer
… What the scientists amassed wasn’t a smoking gun. It’s a suggestive body of evidence that doesn’t absolutely preclude alternative explanations. But this evidence arrives in the broader context of the campaign and everything else that has come to light: The efforts of Donald Trump’s former campaign manager to bring Ukraine into Vladimir Putin’s orbit; the other Trump adviser whose communications with senior Russian officials have worried intelligence officials; the Russian hacking of the DNC and John Podesta’s email.
We don’t yet know what this server was for, but it deserves further explanation.
End of misleading and factually erroneous bombshell. Then, in the retraction, after revisiting and hedging and misleading once again, he finishes by saying:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/11/the_tru...
Trump’s Server, Revisited
Sorting through the new evidence, and competing theories, about the Trump server that appeared to be communicating with a Russian bank.By Franklin Foer
NOV. 2 2016… I concluded my account of these scientists’ search for answers by arguing that the servers and their activity deserved further explanation. Hopefully my story and the debate that has followed will move us closer to a fuller understanding.
They're moving us to a fuller understanding alright! The initial impression was that Russia and Trump had a nefarious connection. The second impression is that Foer MAY have been misled by well-meaning computer experts and that everything is still an open question.
But his ending statements make it very clear this journalist knows he's lying. He's stating that everything he went to such lengths to imply in his long articles may not be true. I just want to encourage readers here at caucus99percent to watch for these legally fraudulent statements.
Comments
Didn’t the Supreme’s rule that disseminating known lies
was Okie-Dokie, that there’s no legal liability to spreading baseless innuendo or inflammatory nonsense? There is no requirement to provide the truth to the consumers of your writing. Truth and facts are optional.
The writer’s Mia Mia Non Culpa is just another creative way to continue to continue to “catapult the propaganda” in his non-retraction.
“ …and when we destroy nature, we diminish our capacity to sense the divine,and understand who God is, and what our own potential is and duties are as human beings.- RFK jr. 8/26/2024
And there is why
I have never returned to slate. I don't care how interesting the headline may be, once your organization proves to be manipulating the facts I'm done.
Regardless of the path in life I chose, I realize it's always forward, never straight.
Amen. Pruning back the list of truly trustworthy sources
is important. My reading and researching time is so much better spent now.
Thank you.
I tend to spend more time looking for fact than I do innuendo.
Unfortunately, most like the entertainment factor instead of fact.
Regardless of the path in life I chose, I realize it's always forward, never straight.
Good catch, Linda
This has been the pattern for some time. They will write a definitive statement as the headline and then some ways down the article you'll see words such as "might have been", "he may have contacted someone", ""there was an attempt to hack" etc etc, but what people will remember reading was the definitive headline just like the example in the article you posted.
I'm still seeing people saying that all 17 intelligence agencies agree that Russia interfered with the election even though it was only the 3 directors from the CIA, FBI and DNI.
Before he left office Obama decided that the media could spread even more propaganda than they normally would.
“When out of fear you twist the lesser evil into the lie that it is something good, you eventually rob people of the capacity to distinguish between good and evil.”
~ Hannah Arendt
I can’t remember what I read yesterday but
whatever it was I quit reading when it used the phrase “17 Intelligence agencies”. That’s probably why I don’t remember what it was. Once I hit that speed bump, I’m done.
I'm tired of this back-slapping "Isn't humanity neat?" bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay? That's all we are. - Bill Hicks
Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. - Frank Zappa
Funny thing is,
, there are only 16.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Intelligence_Community
"I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” —Malcolm X
The CIA rewrites parts of Wikipedia on a daily basis.
I was so disappointed when I realized this, not long ago. And I was disappointed again when I realized that the great majority of Americans would approve of this because someone has to guard the "truth" and maintain consistency and redact state secrets. The lack of citizen oversight in the Federal government explains so much about the future we see before us.
Anyway, the number is regularly switched back and forth between 16 and 17, as recently as yesterday. I immediately suspected the Secret Service of tweaking Wikipedia, because they are not included on the IC list. But more informed sources point a finger at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence [ODNI], because they include themselves in the Intelligence Community. On their home page, it reads:
So, it looks to me like the two "independent" intelligence agencies at the very top, the DNI and the CIA, could be behind the mischief on Wikipedia. The ODNI puts themselves on the IC list and the CIA takes them off.
Hillary must of looked it up on the DNI website.
Thanks for the interesting link.
Populations don’t like wars. They have to be lied into it.
That means we can be “truthed” into peace. — Julian Assange
There are certain key words that if I read make stop
reading an article about anything to do with Russia Gate and anything related to it. Another thing that makes me stop is Wikileaks got the DNC emails from Russia or Russia hacked the DNC computers. I'm amazed that it hasn't run out of steam by now. I thought when people like McCabe, Page and others from the FBI whose testimony showed that nothing was true about the Steele dossier that people would at least stop to think if what they've been told is true or not. But no. And dammit I really wanted to see Rachel explain to people why she has been lying to them.
“When out of fear you twist the lesser evil into the lie that it is something good, you eventually rob people of the capacity to distinguish between good and evil.”
~ Hannah Arendt
Democrats have been fully invested in this lie for 2½ years now
Here’s Robby Mook, Hillary’s campaign manager, less than a month after the election, at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government — Institute of Politics, John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum — in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, claiming in all seriousness (at 17:35) that
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTpOIMIhsUI]
Sorry, Democrats, but Kellyanne Conway comes across as sincere and informative the whole time, while your spokesman comes across as a suave weasel, with that crooked half-smile of his a big “tell” that what he’s saying is untrue and he knows it.
Keep it simple
I remember talking to some of the young alcoholics in my neighborhood on long Island back in the 70’s.
They would travel into the city to work on skyscrapers. Take the train in, get to the site, drink a pint of whisky and get on the boom. The boom was the wrecking ball they used as an elevator. One at a time, up 30, 40, 50 stories, then walk around all day on I-beams. They swore you’d never do it with out the drinks in you.
The only thing they said about Trump, when asked if they met him or saw him, was “He pays good.”
Trump was a little famous in New York; always. He liked the spot light, local news or on the radio; he was a friend of Don Imus and was a frequent guest on his radio show. For years Trump would complain about the government and threatened to run but never did (until he actually did).
I believe he didn’t expect to win. I think he just wanted to get on the dais during the primaries and blow up the spots of some of the politicians. So refreshing this was, he ended up winning!
(anybody see Putney Swope?)
I say all this because Trump is a flim- flam man, he’s been a known commodity for decades. The idea he was in cahoots with Russia struck me as obviously false.
Russia was a deflection tactic, childish too; shoot the messenger! Then (when that didn’t work) it was like getting caught by your parents with pot “It’s not mine! It’s Donald Trumps, I’m just holding it for him!)” Yikes!
Imagine John Le Carre or Robert Ludlum trying to write a character like Trump involved in a soviet conspiracy to elect the president of the united states; they’d give up trying. Chuck Barris is a CIA assassin! indeed.
So, he’s going along insulting everybody (the antithesis of Chauncey Gardiner) and he finds himself on a rocket ship! Ignorant in so many ways of politics, Trump, like the people who voted for him, is thinking “Good, let’s stick it to the bastards.” Thank you Michael Moore… I guess.
Point is, he had no time for conspiracy. He was pinching himself everyday and acting out his schtick, waiting for the loss that never came.
So emotionally disturbing his election was to so many people, they’d believe any excuse; Russia was it, albeit absurd.
Trump about thinking he’d lose — “This is gonna be embarrassing”
Trump talks about thinking he would lose, “this is gonna be embarrassing,” at 1:13:40 in this excellent video reviewing the timeline of the entire 2016 election campaign:
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJ1FLhcMDMM]
(It’s so well-done and comprehensive, and so much more even-handed than the supposedly professional journalistic product of mainstream media, it’s hard to believe that a student did it.)
Propaganda is legal in the US
Propaganda became legalized when the Smith-Mundt Act was repealed in 2013 as part of the NDAA. Now there is nothing to stop the US government from dispensing propaganda to US citizens. This is how insidious it has become for we the people to even try to obtain true information about our own government.
And of course, it passed without so much as a whimper. And terrorism was the excuse for this further curtailing of what few freedoms we had remaining.
Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy