Last paragraph:
While it is of course possible that there is some widespread, coordinated, official effort to feed news outlets false information in order to discredit stories about Trump and Russia, there is no real evidence for that theory, and this story does not offer any. Maddow’s warnings about the need for caution and authentication are important ones, but if — as seems likely — the document MSNBC received was sent by someone who got it from The Intercept’s site, then the significance of this story seems very minimal, and the more ominous theories her report raises seem to be baseless.
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47 comments:
It's fakery all the way down.
Well..Greenwald is sort of an expert on fakery.....
"someone is attempting to destroy the credibility of those who report on Trump’s connections to Russia "
What credibility ?
Counterfactual: If Obama was president, any evidence of attempts to do his administration harm would be treated with outmost seriousness.
It's like confirmation of what she reports is a brand new aspect of the news business that suddenly must be considered in the age of Trump.
It may require a fairly talented IT nerd, but anything created on a computer can be altered on a computer. Lacking the name of a credible NSA whistle blower/leaker, this is a nothing burger. This turtles all the way down.
It's a good thing Rachel Maddow is so astute and on the lookout for forged documents. Why, if that's the way people on MSNBC look at things it would be inconceivable for someone in the intelligence business, let's say . . . the FBI Director, to be taken in by a false document. Inconceivable.
RAchel Maddow is a radical leftwing hack and a liar.
So now the big scoop is that MSNBC has checked the authenticity of some documents?
The big news is that the news is doing one of their presumed core functions?
This isn't a "dog bites man" story. This is a "dog has teeth" story.
Greenwald:
None of this is to suggest that there is no newsworthy story here. It appears, at least if one accepts Maddow’s descriptions of the document, that someone did send her an altered document...
An example of "damning w/ faint praise." Maddow is better than Dan Rather at spotting fake documents.
"RAchel Maddow is a radical leftwing hack and a liar."
Whether she is a liar is beyond my knowledge. She may believe everything she says...in fact, I'd bet she does. However, she is, at most, a Democratic loyalist...not the same thing at all as a "radical leftwing" anything.
She is claiming Dan Rather status. Just when she finally reached being the trusted anchorwoman of Cable News, someone has slipped a Fake But Accurate" document poison pill into her show.
Cherchez Roger Stone.
Bob Boyd said:
"It's like confirmation of what she reports is a brand new aspect of the news business that suddenly must be considered in the age of Trump."
Took a while didn't it? Hahahahaha.
Better late than never.
No true Scotsman, eh, Cookie?
"not the same thing at all as a "radical leftwing" anything."
Yeah, they're all in Germany this week.
The best news this week is that the administration is trying to identify leakers.
Politico is in a panic. Some of their best readers and sources are worried.
"Jerry, just remember. It's not a lie... if you believe it..." - George Costanza
Well -- if she can make a "scoop" out of Trump's Tax Returns from sometime in the last decade, she can make a "scoop" out of this.
I cannot stand Maddow's voice.
Everyone here is talking about why John Podesta refused to give the DNC server to the FBI and the CIA. Disgraceful!
This is for reals, everyone says so.
Greenwald is great.
"Everyone here is talking about why John Podesta refused to give the DNC server to the FBI and the CIA. Disgraceful!"
"This is for reals, everyone says so."
LOL! I bet Putin and Angela were talking about Podesta when she rolled her eyes at him. Everyone at the Summit surely was talking about it!
That Trump sure is a dummy! No one is talking about Podetsa and and the DNC server. No one at all! Not even those in the briar patch are mentioning it.
I remember when Greenwald's name was a sure sign of fake news/disinformation. How did he rehabilitate himself?
Cook - Republicans are Republicans. Republicans are not "right-wingers." - no matter how many times the hack press says so.
Democrats are not democrats - they are leftwing progressives. The democrat party is mostly dead, and leftists have taken its place.
This is a preemptive strike on her part. If--or rather when--she gets caught releasing a phony story, the phony story willl be further proof of the deviousness and perfidy of the Trumpistas.......There have been a lot of phony stories about Trump. More often than not they're a product of Democratic oppo research. Isn't it pretty to believe that some Machiavellian Trump operative is creating them to lure honest journalists to their doom.
Look who else has made himself a central figure in this controversy:
https://twitter.com/benjaminwittes/with_replies
Comey's best friend!
Here Wittes ws backing down from a statement he'd made that The Intercept had been compromised:
https://twitter.com/benjaminwittes/status/883405188609974274
There is a reason that Rachel is commonly referred to as "Rachel Mad Cow". She's long on looney tune lefty theories served up with a healthy addition of smirking snark. Were she self aware, she'd be ashamed to look in the mirror.
They are wrong about the intended target --
It is not "that there is some widespread, coordinated, official effort to feed news outlets false information in order to discredit stories about Trump and Russia."
Rather, there is some widespread, coordinated, official effort to feed news outlets false information in order to discredit Trump. And most of the MSM in their pursuit of agenda/narrative journalism, are all too eager to bite and run with it.
Fakes in the news lately:
This Maddow story
The fake narrative of the Dossier (which the FBI read to Trump and possibly used to get a FISA warrant)
The memo from a Dem activist from Loretta Lynch, promising to take it easy on Hillary Clinton's email investigation. This memo has been reported as both not fake, and as obviously fake but still the reason Comey had to announce the results of the investigation (because someone might take it to not be fake)
Is there going to be a point when all of this starts to make the FBI and media outlets begin to look clownish?
This article talks more about the weird Loretta Lynch memo
http://nypost.com/2017/07/06/new-holes-in-loretta-lynchs-story-on-the-hillary-probe/
The Senate Judiciary Committee, which has launched a bipartisan investigation into Lynch for possible obstruction of justice, recently learned of the existence of a document indicating Lynch assured the political director of Clinton’s campaign she wouldn’t let FBI agents “go too far” in probing the former secretary of state....
The committee, however, now knows of a document obtained by the FBI reportedly showing a Democratic operative’s claim that Lynch had privately assured Renteria that the Justice Department “would not push too deeply” into the investigation of Clinton’s private email server, which contained top secret information from the State Department.
And it will press her to explain the discrepancy — along with why she reportedly asked former FBI Director James Comey to leave her office when he confronted her with the document.
But earlier a similar memo was covered thusly:
http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/26/politics/james-comey-fbi-investigation-fake-russian-intelligence/index.html
Then-FBI Director James Comey knew that a critical piece of information relating to the investigation into Hillary Clinton's email was fake -- created by Russian intelligence -- but he feared that if it became public it would undermine the probe and the Justice Department itself, according to multiple officials with knowledge of the process......
The Russian intelligence at issue purported to show that then-Attorney General Lynch had been compromised in the Clinton investigation. The intelligence described emails between then-Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and a political operative suggesting that Lynch would make the FBI investigation of Clinton go away.
In classified sessions with members of Congress several months ago, Comey described those emails in the Russian claim and expressed his concern that this Russian information could "drop" and that would undermine the Clinton investigation and the Justice Department in general, according to one government official.
Still, Comey did not let on to lawmakers that there were doubts about the veracity of the intelligence, according to sources familiar with the briefings. It is unclear why Comey was not more forthcoming in a classified setting.
Sources close to Comey tell CNN he felt that it didn't matter if the information was accurate, because his big fear was that if the Russians released the information publicly, there would be no way for law enforcement and intelligence officials to discredit it without burning intelligence sources and methods.
And this is how Lindsey Graham responded to this:
Graham told CNN Sunday that Comey did not tell any members of Congress that he believed the email was fake.
“He talked to members of the Senate and House intel committee that he was sitting on emails that the Russians had between the Democratic Party and the Department of Justice that were highly explosive,” Graham said. “He never once told a member of the House or the Senate that he thought the email was fake.”
Graham said that CNN’s report is a “huge deal” and said that Comey “needs to be held accountable.”
So weird.
Acknowledgment of fake documents, fake news, fake science, fake religion/morality, ...
Baby steps.
The ever popular Maddow election night transformation. Long version, eleven minutes
Euphoria to despair
William: "This is a preemptive strike on her part. If--or rather when--she gets caught releasing a phony story, the phony story willl be further proof of the deviousness and perfidy of the Trumpistas......."
This is a common tactic on the left after their BS has been exposed.
Think of Matt Damon's anti fracking movie "Gasland" after inconvenient facts emerged: https://www.google.com/amp/amp.nationalreview.com/article/336636/fracking-fiction-jillian-kay-melchior
Also the attempted whitewash of the CNN "tailwind" lie in "The Newsroom".
Not to mention the whitewash by Hollywood for Rathergate.
It has always been thus. The lefties lie their heads off, get exposed and turn themselves into victims.
However, she is, at most, a Democratic loyalist...not the same thing at all as a "radical leftwing" anything.
Remember..Comrade Marvin considers Pol Pot to be a moderate.
Maddow never expected anyone else to figure out that the documents were based on the Reality Winner material.
I can almost guarantee you this is what happened:
Someone took the Intercept story and supporting material and decided he/she would create a document that would support the Russian Collusion story, and it wasn't done to undermine the credibility of MSNBC, but was done for the same reason many of the false stories being leaked were- to undermine Trump. The problem is that someone at MSNBC at least had the brains to check to see if they weren't a hoax based on the recently published Winner documents and discovered they were. At that point, you don't have to do anymore verification- you know the documents are bogus and you can't use them as such without damaging your own reputation.
That is why there was the 1 month gap between receipt and revelation- it was only after CNN fired the journalists that someone at MSNBC, likely Maddow herself, decided there was another way to use the material- use it to claim Trump was undermining the investigation by leaking false information. However, this doesn't work very well if you also reveal the real reason you knew it was false in the first place since there would be no way to tie it to Trump himself. So Maddow decided to finesse the issue by omitting that little detail because she thought no one would bother checking it that way since she was already admitting it was fake. She was wrong, and got caught almost immediately.
Can Maddow abort the baby and have her, too? I guess it depends on her followers.
I viewed the Euphoria to despair video. Deeply satisfying. Notice all the polls cited that favored Hillary? The polls are shit.
The pollsters tell the MSM what the MSM wants to hear. This strategy gets the pollsters face-time on MSM outlets and their polling companies cited in numerous news shows. The PR is worth millions in free advertising.
Yes, Grackle, that video based on Maddow's pre-election smirking never gets old. I don't think I could ever show my face again after a performance like that. To be forever on YouTube as a clueless moron has to hurt badly.
Notice all the polls cited that favored Hillary? The polls are shit.
No. No. No. According to our own political genius, Chuck, the polls were SPOT ON. Spot on, I tell you. Never in the history of the world were polls SO accurate. You can watch that Maddow video and see how right Chuck was.
SOMEONE sent Maddow those phony documents. SOMEONE! Could it have been Trump himself? Trump IS someone. Lawyers in Michigan have won cases based on this very premise.
Quayle at 8:14 has the essential point. Rachel Maddow is warning like minded journalists: "Everytime you get a leaked document or a leak from an unnamed source, you should assume that it might be a fake designed to discredit you, and you should check it carefully before publishing, even if you think the leak is 'too good to check'." But isn't it amazing that journalists need to be reminded of this. ANd is there a better incentive for journalists to check and double check the veracity of their sources than to have a lot of sources of fake information?
Yancey Ward at 12:29 nailed it--if anyone missed it. That is exactly what happened.
So if you're discovered reporting fake news about the President what is the absolute best set of circumstances you wish existed to defend yourself?
What a coincidence!
Tommy Duncan: It may require a fairly talented IT nerd...
It manifestly does not.
As a professional software developer, this is what galls me about all of this. John Podesta's emails weren't hacked by Russian state-sponsored intelligence agency ninja hackers. He fell for a simple-minded phishing attack script kiddies everywhere use. There's no evidence Russian state-sponsored intelligence agency ninja hackers tampered with the 2016 election; there's one private digital security firm, CrowdStrike (full disclosure: I was the subject of recruitment efforts by CrowdStrike) who identified some IP addresses as belonging to some known hacker groups, but then went on to nickname those groups in a non-standard way and so as to attach suggestions of known Russian affiliation, and by extension, with state support (for which, again, there is no evidence).
Some government agencies, for reasons known only to themselves, also assert without offering evidence that Wikileaks is a Russian intelligence front, and of course there's an overlapping set of agencies/pundits who claim, without offering evidence, that Edward Snowden is a Russian agent.
Basically, the criterion for "Russian agent" seems to be "critical of the status quo in US international relations and especially its intelligence apparatus." Sorry, but it takes quite a bit more than that to add up to "state-sponsored hacker subverting American democracy," especially when so much of the subversion of American democracy observably comes from within, whether or not you have any hacking skills with which to observe it.
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