OH, THE ANGST!
One can feel the anxiety pouring out of the mainstream media stories reporting President Trump’s authorization of Attorney General Barr to declassify the documents underlying the greatest political scandal in American political history — i.e., the Russian collusion hoax. The anxiety is overdetermined. Among other things, it is based in part on the media’s insane opposition to everything Trump and in part on their complicity with the perpetrators of the hoax.
Take, for example, this New York Times lead paragraph in the story by Julian Barnes and David Sanger:
President Trump’s order allowing Attorney General William P. Barr to declassify any intelligence that led to the Russia investigation sets up a potential confrontation with the C.I.A. It effectively strips the agency of its most critical power: choosing which secrets it shares and which ones remain hidden.
We have covered the Times’s publication of classified information in cases too numerous to mention, but including several bearing on this scandal itself. Barnes and Sanger express the utmost respect for the CIA’s “critical power” of declassification and publication, but it is of course a power that the the CIA shares with…the Times itself! In their haste to circulate the Dems’ talking points, it’s a shame that Barnes and Sanger somehow overlook it. Perhaps modesty has overcome Barnes and Sanger.
Coincidentally, we can observe the Times stripping the CIA and other intelligence agencies of “its most critical power” in the matters I cited yesterday in “The Assange indictment.”
NBC News may have given us the most extreme version of the stories reporting the declassification order. Ken Dilanian and Mike Memoli are reporters on the verge of a nervous breakdown in “In stunning move, Trump declassifies documents related to Russia probe.”
Eric Felten teaches us how to read such stories in his valuable RealClearPolitics column “Trump-Russia: The knives are out.” Please do check it out.
Free of the anxiety informing the mainstream media stories, Tom Lifson takes a close look at current developments in “Russia hoax origins to be exposed as Trump authorizes AG Barr to declassify Russia probe documents.” And John Solomon peels off one more layer of the onion in his Hill column “Christopher Steele’s nugget of fool’s gold was easily disproven — but FBI didn’t blink an eye.”
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