Commentary
The entire country was trapped in a nightmare for the past two years as it was tirelessly and relentlessly repeated that President Donald Trump was a traitor who was working on behalf of the Russians.
This theme was hammered home endlessly by most of the broadcast news networks and in the print media.
Ever since Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election to Trump, Democrats in Congress, the media, and several Spygate plotters hired to be political commentators colluded to sell to the American public one of the biggest hoaxes in world history: that Trump only won the election due to cheating with the help of a foreign power.
And now, it’s over.
The end of the Mueller special counsel investigation has pulled back the curtain and exposed the awful truth. Behind the curtain, at long last, there was ... nothing. As in the classic film “The Wizard of Oz,” despite all the fearful appearances and doom-crying promises, in the end, Robert Mueller came out and the Great And Powerful Prosecutor himself admitted there was no evidence of collusion.
All these people were either lying or were being misled, and the consequences of all this are staggering. How could so many people get so much so disastrously wrong for so long?
This wasn’t some brief here-today-gone-tomorrow news story the reporters just happened to get wrong. This was the major news topic that transfixed the entire nation for more than 24 months. News organizations won awards—including Pulitzer Prizes—for their coverage of what now has turned out to be a chimeric mirage.
The mainstream media got so much wrong on the Spygate scandal during the past two years that it’s hard to figure out where to begin this reckoning. But I'll take a shot at it.
Steele Dossier
The Steele dossier was always a massive fraud. Anyone who read it in a discerning fashion—rather than just dumbly swallowing what it claimed—could easily see that. Yet, despite the manifest absurdities in the dossier, for more than two years, news media organizations frantically and breathlessly published one Fake News story after another based on it.
Former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page was alleged to have been a key Russian agent in a massive plot to subvert the 2016 election, with crucial help from people such as then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former Trump Organization lawyer Michael Cohen.
Media outlets hawked absurd stories about Manafort sneaking into one of the most secure buildings in the world to supposedly meet with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and about Cohen being in Prague to pay off the hackers of Democratic National Committee emails.
Despite plenty of evidence out there showing that these claims were bogus, media outlets pressed on with them. McClatchy, BuzzFeed News, and several other media outlets made increasingly desperate attempts to rehabilitate the Steele dossier, trashing their own credibility in the process.
The crack team of highly motivated Democratic partisans who comprised the Mueller special counsel office, who had been given a super-wide scope within which to search, couldn’t indict a single person on any of the allegations found in the Steele dossier.
Even Page, the person the FBI swore before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) was at the very center of all this Trump–Russian collusion, came away with no criminal charges whatsoever. That’s exactly as I predicted months ago, in a column here at The Epoch Times entitled “They Don’t Have Anything on Carter Page, And They Never Did.”
Hopefully, the final release of Mueller’s report will at last lay to rest all of this media serial fabulism based on a fake dossier that came straight from the Clinton campaign.
Trump Tower Meeting
These same Fake News outlets spent more than a year and a half confidently pontificating that the June 9, 2016, Trump Tower meeting between Trump campaign members and two Russian lobbyists was a clear-cut, open-and-shut case of collusion. It was asserted confidently by numerous media journalists and pundits that just on the basis of this meeting alone, Mueller would easily be able to send Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Manafort to prison.
This was despite the fact that the two Russians at that meeting were both connected to Fusion GPS—the company hired by the Clinton campaign and the DNC to produce the Steele dossier. Natalia Veselnitskaya and Rinat Akhmetshin were both known associates of Fusion GPS and its co-founder, Glenn Simpson. In fact, Veselnitskaya met with Simpson shortly before and immediately after the Trump Tower meeting. Fusion GPS had been hired on behalf of Russians to lobby against the Magnitsky Act.
After having set up the Trump Tower meeting, based on the false pretense of having damaging information on Clinton that she didn’t actually possess, Veselnitskaya quickly turned the purpose of the Trump Tower meeting to–surprise!—lobbying the Trump campaign team members against the Magnitsky Act. Not surprisingly, when he realized the true purpose of the meeting, Donald Trump Jr. quickly ended it and left. The only information that changed hands was the same anti-Magnitsky Act flyer that Veselnitskaya and Akhmetshin had been passing around the Washington area for some time.
The mainstream media simply glossed over these pertinent facts and went on prattling at length about the manifest Russian collusion this meeting represented. They were just so darn sure that Mueller was going to make multiple indictments from this meeting alone.
And yet again, just as with the Steele dossier, the number of indictments Mueller made, based on this over-hyped Trump Tower meeting, is: zero.
“Flipped” Trump Associates
Major media outlets spent months publishing news reports, based on sources that were supposedly inside or super-close to the Mueller special counsel office, that claimed former Trump associates Michael Flynn, Cohen, and Manafort had “flipped” and were all singing like canaries about all the supposed Russian collusion they'd been a part of.
Rest assured, we were all repeatedly informed by serious journalists in both television and print media that Mueller was meticulously compiling mountains of evidence of collusion that would soon come crashing down on the Trump presidency.
And now ... here we are. Every single story alleging that these special counsel targets had flipped and were informing against Trump was absolutely false.
Where Are The Retractions?
Thus far, I haven’t seen any retractions whatsoever of all the Fake News many of these media outlets inundated their audiences with in a never-ending flood. A professional media company would correct the record. So where are the corrections so far?
After having gotten this story so completely and totally wrong, will any of these news outlets now publicly retract the many articles and editorials and think pieces they published that pushed all these false collusion claims? Is there any ethics at all or accountability left in the mainstream news industry?
A very curious American public watches and waits.
Brian Cates is a writer based in South Texas and author of “Nobody Asked For My Opinion … But Here It Is Anyway!” He can be reached on Twitter @drawandstrike.
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