According to Schmidt, there is nothing wrong with the Russia collusion narrative at all—it just hasn’t been proven yet.
The Trump Administration has been declassifying documents related to the various Russia collusion probes of Donald Trump. Recently, the White House published the FBI’s opening and closing memos for Oxferd Comma, an investigation launched in May 2017 to examine Trump’s Russia ties and his possible obstruction of previous investigations. The disclosures indicate that rogue FBI agents opened the investigation with flimsy predication to get revenge for Trump’s firing of FBI Director Jim Comey a week earlier.
This poses a problem for disciples of the Trump-Russia collusion theory, who needed someone to do damage control, downplay the revelations, and create an alternative media narrative.
That’s where the New York Times’ Michael Schmidt stepped in. Having parlayed the Russia collusion narrative into national prominence, including a book deal and an MSNBC contributor gig, Schmidt’s credibility is on the line when the collusion narrative weakens. So he penned a story that cites the Oxferd Comma revelations to make the startling argument that Trump-Russia collusion has not been investigated enough.
Schmidt was among the Times’ top writers on Trump-Russia collusion, authoring or co-authoring dozens of stories on the topic. He wrote or co-wrote some of the Times’ seminal Trump-Russia pieces, and his work featured among the Times and Washington Post collusion stories awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in national reporting. The issue was so crucial to the Times that its executive editor, Dean Baquet, once revealed that the paper built up its entire newsroom around this single story.
Schmidt’s collusion stories rely extremely heavily on anonymous sources. Trump and his associates’ alleged malfeasance is regularly conveyed by “two people with knowledge of the episode,” “four people told of the matter,”“former law enforcement officials and others familiar with the investigation,” “two people who have heard his account,” “several people familiar with the discussion,” “four current and former American officials,” “five people familiar with the matter,” and other unknown actors.
Naturally, the risk of depending on unnamed, unaccountable sources is that they may be telling partial truths or outright falsehoods for self-serving or political purposes. Schmidt understands this intimately. In 2015, he co-authored an anonymously sourced story reporting that two inspectors general had asked the Department of Justice to open a criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton due to her use of a private email server. The story collapsed soon after publication, requiring extensive corrections revealing that the IGs had called for neither a criminal investigation nor any probe directly targeting Clinton.
Labeling the article a “mess,” the Times’ public editor, Margaret Sullivan, publicly warned about “the lack of accountability that comes with anonymous sources” and called for Times editors to address their reporters’ “rampant use of anonymous sources” and exercise more caution “before publishing a political blockbuster based on shadowy sources.”
Nevertheless, a few months later Schmidt co-wrote another anonymously sourced piece that crashed and burned. The story accused immigration authorities of having missed red-flag jihadist social media posts by an immigrant from Pakistan who later participated in a terror attack in San Bernardino, killing fourteen people. But it turned out the killer’s public social media posts were actually private messages.
Media outlets widely re-reported the false story before realizing the mistake. The blunder was so severe that the mainstream press blasted the Times, with the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple saying the story “set fire to the news system,” Esquire condemning the Times’ “source pollution,” Mother Jones insisting that Schmidt and one of his coauthors be “considered on probation,” and Salon calling it “an epic reporting fail.” Surveying the damage, Sullivan again decried the Times’ “overuse of unnamed government sources” in a column titled, “Systemic Change Needed After Faulty Times Article.”
Schmidt and the Times editors had little interest in Sullivan’s warnings, judging by their unbridled promotion of anonymous sources to propel the Russia collusion narrative. Fortunately for them, Sullivan left the Times in April 2016, and in an amazing coincidence of timing, the paper announced in May 2017 that it would abolish the entire position of public editor, allowing the bulk of its anonymously sourced Russia collusion reporting to emerge without any public complaints from a pesky internal watchdog.
With that history in mind, let’s look at Schmidt’s recent piece. Based on the recently declassified Oxferd Comma documents and interviews with an unspecified number of unnamed former federal law enforcement officials, Schmidt’s story begins with some throat-clearing to set the narrative:
For the last year, the Trump administration’s efforts to seek retribution against intelligence officials and FBI agents who investigated Russia’s 2016 election meddling have been spearheaded by federal prosecutors in South Florida trying to build a criminal case.
But in recent weeks, the White House has added a dimension to its push to rewrite the history of the Russia investigation, releasing a trove of previously classified FBI memos that it says back up President Donald Trump’s claims that a so-called deep state was out to get him.
Schmidt frames the Trump Administration’s efforts to declassify Russia collusion-related documents as a push to “seek retribution” and “rewrite the history of the Russia investigation.” It’s as if there was no malfeasance at all in federal Russia collusion investigations, meaning Trump’s declassifications must be solely aimed at retribution.
And in fact, there really isn’t much malfeasance to be found—aside from the conviction of FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith for lying about Trump associate Carter Page’s cooperation with U.S. intelligence against Russian spies, FISA Court Presiding Judge Rosemary Collyer declaring that the FBI had misled the court in Page-related submissions, the seventeen major errors and omissions identified by Inspector General Michael Horowitz in the FISA warrants to spy on Page, CIA Director John Brennan’s manipulation of the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessmenton Russian election interference, the FBI assigning informants to spy on Trump Campaign associates, the Peter Strozk/Lisa Page text messages disparaging Trump and his supporters, the improper wiping of phones used by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s staff, Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr’s transmission to the FBI of false allegations by Christopher Steele after the FBI had fired Steele as a source, the employment of Ohr’s wife to dig up dirt on Trump and his family, FBI Director Jim Comey leaking to the press to force the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Trump, Comey orchestrating an ambush interview of Michael Flynn, the FBI’s misuse of a defensive briefing to spy on Flynn, and other transgressions that clearly bore Schmidt.
Schmidt’s dismissive reference to the “so-called deep state” is also noteworthy. It’s hard enough to deny people are working inside the government to sabotage Trump’s agenda when key Russia collusion investigators like Strozk and Page explicitly vowed to stop Trump from being elected, when FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith responded to Trump’s election by declaring “Viva la resistance,” and when Schmidt’s own newspaper published the iconic, anonymous column, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration” (sub-head: “I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.”)
But Schmidt’s ridicule is even more problematic considering he wrote an entire book praising the very deep state he denies exists. According to the publisher, Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President “chronicles the clash between a president and the officials of his own government who tried to stop him.” With a particular focus on Jim Comey and Don McGahn, the book “records the clash between an increasingly emboldened president and those around him, who find themselves trying to thwart the president they had pledged to serve, unsure whether he is acting in the interest of the country, his ego, his family business, or Russia.” This self-refuting argument, denying there is a deep state while extolling its bravery, is a strange habit among Russia collusion reporters.
As in Schmidt’s book, Jim Comey looms large in his collusion reporting. Schmidt has informed us that In a Private Dinner, Trump Demanded Loyalty. Comey Demurred, and Comey Memos Provide Intimate Look Into Trump Presidency, and Comey Defends Trump Campaign Surveillance: ‘I Have Never Thought of That as Spying’, and Comey’s Memos Were a Product of a Culture of Note-Keeping, and Comey Told Sessions: Don’t Leave Me Alone With Trump, and Comey Says Trump Pressured Him to ‘Lift the Cloud’ of Inquiry, among other heroic acts by the former FBI Director.
Unsurprisingly, we learned at a June 2017 congressional hearing that Comey was a source for Schmidt—Comey testified that he’d used a friend as a cut-out to pass one of his memos to a reporter in hopes (successfully, as it turned out) of ginning up pressure to appoint a special counsel to investigate Trump. The resulting New York Times story, Comey Memo Says Trump Asked Him to End Flynn Investigation, appeared under Schmidt’s solo byline.
Thus, it must have been particularly embarrassing for Schmidt when, during that same hearing, Comey denounced one of the pivotal collusion stories Schmidt co-wrote, Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence, as being “almost entirely wrong,” and Comey revealed that he’d informed senators of both parties that the story was false. It’s bad enough for a reporter to be denounced at a nationally televised hearing as a purveyor of fake news, but it’s even worse when you’re being condemned by your own source.
In his new piece, Schmidt asserts, “There is little new of substance in the documents, and nothing that fundamentally undercuts the FBI’s rationale for pursuing the Russia investigation.”
Of course, we don’t need new documents to undercut the rationale for the Russia collusion investigation because it’s already been demolished. The rationale was Australian diplomat Alexander Downer telling the FBI that a Trump campaign volunteer, George Papadopoulos, had “suggested” that the Trump campaign had received “some kind of suggestion” from Russia that it could release thousands of emails that would embarrass Hillary Clinton. So there was a suggestion of a suggestion—and this was third-hand information that Papadopoulos heard not from anyone in the Trump campaign, but from a Maltese professor named Joseph Mifsud who, Papadopoulos asserted, claimed he had heard it from unspecified Russian officials.
So, like a kids’ game of Telephone, the chain of custody of this set of suggestions was the following: Unknown Russian officials →Mifsud→Papadopoulos→Downer→FBI. This is what’s commonly known as a rumor. Moreover, Mifsud denied to the FBI that he made this assertion at all. But for Schmidt, this is the unquestionable, unimpeachable basis for the FBI to investigate the campaign of U.S. presidential candidate for colluding with a foreign power.
Schmidt then discusses the recent revelations about the Russia collusion investigation. The probe, Schmidt comments, “was oddly code-named Oxferd Comma.” The FBI misspelling the name of its own investigation is odd, indeed. An inquisitive reporter might wonder whether, in an improper investigation motivated by FBI agents seeking revenge against a president who had just fired their boss, the odd name might reflect an attempt to sabotage Freedom of Information Act requests related to the probe. But Schmidt is satisfied simply to note theinexplicable curiosity and move on.
Without comment, Schmidt lists the remarkably weak justifications for Oxferd Comma cited by the FBI memo opening the investigation, including the Papadopoulos rumor, Trump’s explanation for firing Comey, media reports about Trump’s business ties to Russia, and Trump complaining to Comey about the previous Russia collusion investigation. Among the five listed justifications, the memo’s longest, most detailed justification is that the Trump campaign intervened to soften language in the 2016 Republican National Convention platform related to Ukraine, changing a demand for the provision to Ukraine of “lethal defensive weapons” to a call for rendering “appropriate assistance.”
This was a classic misreported Russia collusion story that illustrates the media-FBI feedback loop that drove much of the collusion narrative. The loop works like this:
1. The New York Times or Washington Post publishes a wildly distorted or outright false collusion story that is uncritically re-reported by hundreds of other media outlets. Often, the story is based on claims by anonymous “officials” or “law enforcement officials” who are probably FBI agents.
2. The FBI or Mueller probe investigates the Trump associates who are alleged to have done something terrible to help Putin.
3. The investigators leak to the media that they’re investigating the matter, creating another wave of media stories.
Indeed, the Oxferd Comma opening memo cites “multiple open source reports” concerning the 2016 RNC platform’s Ukraine language. Far from illustrating Trump’s affinity for Putin, however, the change actually strengthened the platform’s pro-Ukraine plank. After removing a specific commitment to provide defensive weapons to Ukraine, which only appeared in a proposed amendment and not in the platform’s operative language, the amendment’s final, approved language read, “We support maintaining and, if warranted, increasing sanctions, together with our allies, against Russia unless and until Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity are fully restored. We also support providing appropriate assistance to the armed forces of Ukraine and greater coordination with NATO defense planning.” Astonishingly, this robust commitment to defend Ukraine against Russia, which was far stronger and more specific than the Ukraine planks in the Democratic National Committee’s platform, was cited by the FBI to help justify investigating whether Trump was a Russian agent.
Breezing straight past these inconveniences, Schmidt gets to his main point: Trump-Russia collusion hasn’t been investigated enough. He explains that Oxferd Comma was opened as a dual investigation—a criminal probe of whether Trump obstructed justice by firing Comey and a counterintelligence probe of Trump’s ties to Russia. Schmidt argues, however, that when Mueller took over the probes, Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein only allowed Mueller to focus on the criminal prong, not the counterintelligence prong. Therefore, says Schmidt, counterintelligence concerns like Trump’s personal and business ties to Russia, and whether Russia had compromised him, remain unexamined to this day.
Without acknowledging it was, in fact, a counterintelligence investigation, Schmidt waves away the nearly year-long Crossfire Hurricane probe of Russia collusion that preceded Mueller’s appointment, claiming it did not look “directly at Trump’s personal conduct or his ties to Russia.”
The Oxferd Comma counterintelligence investigation is of long-standing interest to Schmidt. He coauthored the January 11, 2019 Times article revealing the probe’s existence (though not its name). Furthermore, his claim that Rosenstein stopped Mueller from running a counterintelligence investigation is nothing new. In August 2020, the Times published an excerpt from his book making that precise argument—which Mueller’s top investigator, Andrew Weissmann, promptly denounced as “wrong.”
Overall, there is hardly any information in Schmidt’s piece, aside from the investigation’s name, that he hadn’t already reported. But Schmidt has a vested interest in defending the narrative around Russia collusion generally and around the Oxferd Comma investigation specifically. So he responded to the revelations of the probe’s weak predication by simply recycling his old narrative.
Since he’s spent years bemoaning the insufficient counterintelligence investigation of Trump’s ties to Russia, it’s worth considering what are the damning indicators that Schmidt believes need to be probed. In his three pieces on this topic, he lists numerous allegations related to Trump’s personal or business ties to Russia raised either by the FBI or Schmidt himself:
• Unverified rumors that the Russian government had compromising material on Trump connected to sexual affairs he purportedly had in Moscow in 1996 and/or 2013.(The Senate Intelligence Committee reported that the committee “did not establish” that such material existed.)
• Trump publicly joking that he hoped Russia finds Hillary Clinton’s missing emails.
• The false reports on the Ukraine language in the 2016 RNC platform.
• Christopher Steele’s discredited allegations that Russian officials were blackmailing and bribing Trump.
• Press reports that Trump did business with Russians
• Trump showing “an openness to Russia” and refusing to criticize Russian aggression (thus elevating disagreement with Trump’s foreign policy into a potential act of treason by Trump.)
• Trump rejecting the intelligence assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump. (The assessment was debunked by a House Intelligence Committee report showing how CIA Director John Brennan corruptly manufactured this pre-determined conclusion.)
• Trump’s unsuccessful effort to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. (This was investigated by Mueller, who found no criminal conspiracy and did not cite any direct contact between Trump and Russian officials, though Michael Cohen was convicted of making a false statement about the project’s timing.)
Schmidt’s argument relies on his refusal to acknowledge a mountain of evidence refuting all his points while stringing together conspiracy theories, debunked allegations, and clinically paranoid speculation. Schmidt inadvertently captures the delusional mindset of collusion conspiracists in a quote he got from FBI official Andrew McCabe, the instigator of the Oxferd Comma counterintelligence investigation, who described what the probe was meant to discover: “Could the president actually be the point of coordination between the campaign and the Russian government?”
Granted, Comey didn’t sound much more sane when he blurted out, “I don’t know whether the current president of the United States was with prostitutes peeing on each other in Moscow in 2013. It’s possible, but I don’t know.”
Despite the nearly year-long Crossfire Hurricane investigation, the nearly two-year-long Mueller probe, and every major media outlet in America spending almost three years chasing down every preposterous collusion allegation, there’s still no evidence of collusion. Yet according to Schmidt, there is nothing wrong with the Russia collusion narrative at all—it just hasn’t been proven yet.
At this point, Michael Schmidt is a Japanese soldier hiding in the Philippine jungle in 1970, refusing to acknowledge the war was lost. He is a guy standing next to Geraldo as he opens Al Capone’s empty vault, insisting it’s full of invisible treasure. He is an organizer of the Fyre Festival raving about the great concert as malnourished, dehydrated, disheveled concertgoers are being evacuated. He is Kevin Bacon in Animal House, screaming “all is well” as the town descends into chaos around him.
At least that’s what I was told by three officials familiar with the matter.
By – https://lyceumnow.com/real-russiagate-has-never-been-tried/
