taibbi the new york times sinks below fox

Late on Thursday, October 24th, the New York Times ran a big story about Attorney General Bill Barr and former Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham opening a criminal probe into the origins of Russiagate. The story is a new low in the ongoing three-year fiasco of Russiagate coverage. The Times has gone from trumpeting the gravity of every Trump-Russia probe to shrouding each paragraph in consumer warnings, terrified readers might think for themselves. This is the kind of behavior mainstream reporters used to mock in conservative media. The Fox habit of blasting out dumbed-down chryons and crawls (UNGRATEFUL TRAITOR plastered over a picture of Chelsea Manning is an example), to make sure audiences gleaned the correct message, was ridiculed. Regarding the latest Times story, some background: Not long after Donald Trump was elected, unnamed intelligence and law enforcement sources began feeding stories to newspapers like the Times and the Washington Post. Audiences were tossed a series of bombshells, nearly all having to do with “connections” or “ties” between Donald Trump and Russia. Trump aide George Papadopoulos was linked by email to a “Russian intelligence operation.” Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn demonstrated “apparent closeness with a Russian woman” at a Cambridge University confab, a scene that “alarmed” a U.S. intelligence source. A secret court deemed probable cause existed to believe former Trump aide Carter Page was an “agent of a foreign power.” All this was in addition to explosive allegations like the one claiming Donald Trump himself was being sexually blackmailed by Vladimir Putin, who was said to have a tape of the president watching hookers pee on a Ritz-Carlton bed once slept in by Barack Obama. Many of these tales became part of the investigation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, itself an outgrowth of an FBI investigation disclosed to the public by James Comey in House testimony in March, 2017. To say coverage of these probes was credulous is an understatement. When Mueller was appointed in May of 2017, the Times in the first paragraph told readers it was a matter of awesome import that might end a presidency: WASHINGTON — The Justice Department appointed Robert S. Mueller III, a former F.B.I. director, as special counsel on Wednesday to oversee the investigation into ties between President Trump’s campaign and Russian officials, dramatically raising the legal and political stakes in an affair that has threatened to engulf Mr. Trump’s four-month-old presidency. When Mueller’s report landed two years later and it turned out there was no intelligence conspiracy, reporters and audiences alike should have wondered: what the hell? Years of stories, based almost entirely upon unnamed sources, led millions to believe the President of the United States – Donald Trump, but still – was a compromised Russian asset. What happened? How and why was this narrative unrolled to the public? Had laws been broken? Had intelligence been manipulated or leaked illegally? All of this became the subject of investigation by new Trump Attorney General Bill Barr, who last May named former Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham to dig into the matter. The news breaking now is that Durham/Barr appear to have opened a criminal investigation, upping the stakes from an “administrative review.” It would be wrong to suggest the opening of a criminal probe suggests Durham/Barr uncovered something damning, just as it would have been improper to conclude Trump was guilty based on news of the Mueller probe opening. At this stage, nobody knows what Durham has or doesn’t have. It might be meaningful, it might not be. The normal press procedure would be to wait to flip out until more concrete information is released, but the paper is already warning readers away from information it has not even seen yet. The headline and sub-headline tell readers right away how to digest the news: JUSTICE DEPT. IS SAID TO OPEN CRIMINAL INQUIRY INTO ITS OWN RUSSIA INVESTIGATION The move is likely to open the attorney general to accusations that he is trying to deliver a political victory for President Trump. This is classic timorous Times language. The paper can’t say outright that Durham’s probe is a political witch hunt, so it uses passive news-ese to say the story will “open” Durham to “accusations” that the investigation is political. From the story’s third paragraph: The opening of a criminal investigation is likely to raise alarms that Mr. Trump is using the Justice Department to go after his perceived enemies. Mr. Trump fired James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director under whose watch agents opened the Russia inquiry, and has long assailed other top former law enforcement and intelligence officials as partisans who sought to block his election. More disclaimers: the probe is “likely to raise alarms” (read: by us at the Times) that Trump is using the Justice Department to go after his “perceived” enemies. The paper goes on: Mr. Barr’s reliance on Mr. Durham, a widely respected and veteran prosecutor who has investigated C.I.A. torture and broken up Mafia rings, could help insulate the attorney general from accusations that he is doing the president’s bidding and putting politics above justice. This is a news version of the Twitter troll taunt, “Are you sure this is the hill you want to die on?” The Times says Durham is “widely respected,” but implies he will lose that designation if he goes on to do “the president’s bidding” and put “politics above justice.” More: Federal investigators need only a “reasonable indication” that a crime has been committed to open an investigation, a much lower standard than the probable cause required to obtain search warrants. However, “there must be an objective, factual basis for initiating the investigation; a mere hunch is insufficient,” according to Justice Department guidelines. The paper is saying there doesn’t need to be much there, in order for Durham/Barr to open a criminal probe. Nothing like such a disclaimer appeared in the Times when it told us about the launching of, say, the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation. The Times for instance didn’t greet the news of the Steele dossier’s leak with reassurances that it was an unverifiable tale based on a “mere” unnamed source. Instead, the paper published a lengthy history of Russian “sexual blackmail” dating back to Stalin’s era, bolstering what turned out to be a nonsense story. Next up was one of the subtlest (and slimiest) passages in the piece: The F.B.I. opened the investigation in late July 2016, code-named Crossfire Hurricane, after receiving information from the Australian government that a Trump campaign adviser had been approached with an offer of stolen emails that could damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign. F.B.I. agents discovered the offer shortly after stolen Democratic emails were released, and the events, along with ties between other Trump advisers and Russia, set off fears that the Trump campaign was conspiring with Russia’s interference. The original Times stories about this episode concerned young Trump aide George Papadopoulos, who supposedly was fed tales of Russian “dirt” on Hillary Clinton by a mysterious Maltese professor named Joseph Mifsud. This episode is the stated official reason for opening an FBI investigation into Donald Trump’s relationship with Russia. From the Mueller report: That information prompted the FBI on July 31, 2016, to open an investigation into whether individuals associated with the Trump Campaign were coordinating with the Russian government in its interference activities. Previous Times stories described Papadopoulos as having been definitively linked by emails to a “Russian intelligence operation.” A December 30, 2017 Times story called, “How the Russia Inquiry Began: A Campaign Aide, Drinks and Talk of Political Dirt” touted the Mifsud episode as a clear indication of a Russia-Trump connection: During a night of heavy drinking at an upscale London bar in May 2016, George Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, made a startling revelation to Australia’s top diplomat in Britain: Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton… Mr. Papadopoulos met Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese professor at a now-defunct London academy who had valuable contacts with the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs… Their joint goal was to arrange a meeting between Mr. Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Moscow, or between their respective aides. That story is a mess now. No one knows who the hell Joseph Mifsud is, or whether there was ever any Russian involvement in this tale. As such, the Times can’t go there in this week’s write-up. Instead, the paper now writes that the Papadolpoulos tale set off “fears that that Trump campaign was conspiring with Russia’s interference” for timing reasons only, because it came just “after” the DNC hack and in conjunction with “ties between other Trump advisers and Russia.” In other words, this is a completely new version of events, with the Mifsud angle edited out. Remember that this is supposedly the patient zero episode for the Trump-Russia investigation — and there’s no longer any Russia in the story. The Times can’t blame this change on sources. Even if they’re now being told by “people familiar with the matter” a new version of the Papadopoulos story, the paper already committed to another version. How does this discrepancy not bother editors? The paper goes on: Mr. Barr is closely managing the Durham investigation, even traveling to Italy to seek help from officials there to run down an unfounded conspiracy that is at the heart of conservatives’ attacks on the Russia investigation — that the Italian government helped set up the Trump campaign adviser who was told in 2016 that the Russians had damaging information that could hurt Clinton’s campaign. As Vanity Fair’s T.A. Frank noted in a terrific piece a few weeks ago, it may well be an “unfounded conspiracy” to say the Italian government helped “set up” Papadopoulos. There’s no concrete evidence of, say, the CIA instructing the Maltese academic to feed poor Papadopoulos the “dirt” story. That idea that the CIA or the FBI literally concocted such narratives out of whole cloth to frame Trump is (at least so far) unsupported. However, there’s nothing “unfounded” about trying to find out who the hell Joseph Mifsud is. The prevailing press theory for years, one Robert Mueller himself seemed to embrace, was that Mifsud was a Russian cutout. The Special Prosecutor however never proved or even asserted that Mifsud was a Russian agent. Mueller in his report instead used the sleazy term “Russia-related contact” to describe Mifsud, which should have been a big red flag for al. In retrospect, it raises the question of whether or not Mueller knew Mifsud had no real Russia ties when he wrote the report. Mueller and the FBI really have some explaining to do with regard to its characterizations of Mifsud. Mueller answered, “I can’t get into that,” when asked by Jim Jordan if Mifsud was Western intelligence or Russian intelligence (he didn’t offer a third possibility, neither). The Daily Beast not long ago reported that Mifsud, before he went into hiding (this whole story is so absurdly cloak-and-dagger!), asked for Italian police protection. He supposedly gave a taped deposition to “explain just why people might want to harm him.” From the Beast story: A source in the Italian Ministry of Justice, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told The Daily Beast that Barr and Durham were played the tape… If that tape exists, we should all want to hear it. In fact, given this story’s importance in two long years of suffocating controversies, we should all want to see this guy rolled into Dulles, masked and on a gurney like Hannibal Lecter. Mifsud might end up being an incidental character who got sucked into this thing by accident, but we’re owed an explanation nonetheless. The Times and most of the “mainstream media” want us to believe that any Durham criminal probe is a bogus tactic, a “tool to be wielded against political enemies.” If that sounds familiar, it’s because stations like Fox and politicians like Trump want audiences to see the Ukraine/impeachment investigation in exactly that same light (“Another witch hunt,” Trump says). Both takes are simplistic. We’re beyond any scenario where there’s a good side and a bad side. Even if by some remote chance there were a clear innocent/guilty partisan narrative underneath all of this, we wouldn’t know, because neither side’s media has any capacity anymore for juggling ambiguous narratives. The Times, just like Fox, now defaults to the unbelievably simplistic. Most other commercial outlets are following suit. For instance, Trump seems to have far-out ideas about Ukraine’s role in Russiagate (he may believe a theory that Ukraine hacked the DNC, for instance). Still, it’s an undeniable fact that Ukraine worked to help Democrats oppose Trump in 2016. A Ukrainian court has ruled that its government “meddled” illegally in the American election, among other things by providing information about payments made to former Trump campaign manager Manafort. This was after a veteran Democratic operative named Andrea Chalupa traveled to Ukraine in search of Trump oppo, which, not that anyone cares, is a similar story to Ukrainegate, the difference being that Chalupa was not president of the United States when she asked a foreign government for dirt about a presidential candidate. Even making the simple factual observation that the Chalupa/Ukraine transaction took place, however, has become an impossibility in the current media landscape. The Chalupa story was originally broken by Politico reporter Ken Vogel in 2017 (“Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire”). But Politico now describes Trump being committed to “unsubstantiated allegations… a conspiracy theory that Ukraine aided Democrats in the 2016 election.” Politico originally reported that conspiracy theory! That’s how weird things have gotten. It’s 1984/Winston Smith-level reality-editing. There’s no context in which it would be legitimate to leverage taxpayer-funded military aid to get information about a personal political rival. But the context of the impeachment drama would change if turned out there were illegalities at the heart of Russiagate. Even a step down from what Trump appears to believe, about a 100% frame job, would be devastating corruption. If, for instance, the CIA or FBI merely leaked or over-interpreted intelligence it knew to be false or unreliable because it served a desired political end would be inexcusable, a kind of domestic WMD scandal. That wouldn’t wholly excuse the Trump/Giuliani counterattacking caper, but it sure would explain it. We could be seeing wide-scale corruption and departures from norms in all directions. These dueling investigations should be understood as the prelude to a Götterdämmerung in which neither side may be right, and the more important question, unfortunately, might end up being who makes their case first. During a time like this, people need factual reports more than ever. All we’re getting instead are team press releases like this upchucked Times story. What a mess.