The Plot Against the President

by Lee Smith

  The current state of the US press is partly a function of social media and their unique financial model.

  With the rise of the Internet in the mid-1990s, publishers assumed that digital advertising would eventually make up for the enormous losses in print advertising. While they waited, publications around the country shut down for good, others hemorrhaged cash, and thousands of media professionals were laid off.

  With much of the infrastructure damaged or destroyed, the press’s ability to produce reliable information was severely impaired. The tragedy was compounded when the bulk of the digital advertising that was supposed to rescue the press went instead to Silicon Valley’s new hybrid models: social media.

  Today, social media platforms—Facebook, Google, Twitter, and so on—own nearly the entire advertising market. Facebook is worth $350 billion—more than one hundred times the value of the New York Times.

  The hybrids have two enormous advantages. One, they don’t have to pay to create content. Since it comes free, they’re spared having to invest in the infrastructure that sustains other content producers, such as news organizations. Traditional media companies have to pay reporters, photographers, illustrators, and other professionals to produce content. Two, social media have no legal responsibility to provide reliable information. Therefore, they have no need to pay for people to ensure that content is accurate, such as editors and fact checkers, as well as legal teams, who also fight First Amendment challenges.

  For social media companies, all those costs are borne by regular media companies. News organizations give their content away for free because they have little choice. Rather than bite the hand that feeds them, they trust that the social media giants will continue to send traffic their way—even as they know the overlords can redirect or close down that traffic through proprietary algorithms.

  How did this happen?

  In the 1990s, tech visionaries and forward-thinking legislators were eager to protect America’s great internet adventure. One concern was that if service providers—websites and so on—were constantly sued for posting objectionable content or filtering or blocking content providers (porn sites, for instance), digital innovation would grind to a halt.

  Congress wrote a law, Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, that distinguished between interactive computer services, which Google and Twitter would eventually become, and information content providers, which created or developed information.

  The law absolved interactive computer service providers of liability. According to the CDA, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

  Nunes’s suit argued that Twitter is in fact an information content provider or developer in itself.

  Twitter is not a bulletin board like Yelp, for instance, that allows anyone to post a review of Restaurant X or Handbag Store Y. By shadow banning and deplatforming some users—conservatives—while promoting others, even monetizing their feeds with advertising, Twitter shapes a particular political narrative. Because Twitter tells a story, it is an information content provider. Nunes and his lawyer Steven Biss challenged Twitter’s immunity from defamation suits.

  The direct effect of the suit would be to make social media platforms such as Twitter decide: Are they, as the CDA described the internet, forums “for a true diversity of political discourse, unique opportunities for cultural development, and myriad avenues for intellectual activity”? Or are they platforms pushing particular politicized narratives while excluding others? If the latter, they must be held liable, like any other content provider or content developer.

  A possible, and indirect, effect of Nunes’s action might be to strip the social media giants of their twofold advantage over traditional media organizations: not paying for content and not being held liable. Maybe leveling the playing field will encourage entrepreneurs to compete in a fairer media market for audience and advertising.

  “We need a real press corps,” says Nunes says. “Policy makers and especially the US public.”

  The suit against McClatchy underscored the character of a media organization unmoored from its obligations to deliver reliable information to its readers. The complaint cited a May 23, 2018, article published by the McClatchy-owned Fresno Bee: “A Yacht, Cocaine, Prostitutes: Winery Partly Owned by Nunes Sued After Fundraiser Event.” The article, which insinuated that Nunes might have been involved in a sordid yacht party, was quickly debunked when it emerged that had Nunes had no connection to the event at all and was not even mentioned in the lawsuit on which the story was based.

  The Fresno Bee article, published weeks before Nunes’s June 5 primary race, was, according to the suit, “part of a scheme to defame Nunes.”

  Journalists, said Nunes, had “abandoned the role of journalist and chose to leverage their considerable power to spread falsehoods and to defame” for “political and financial gain.”

  McClatchy was notorious in that respect. Its Washington, DC, news bureau had taken a strong position on the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory, moving it wholesale on behalf of its original producers, Fusion GPS.

  Unlike the Pulitzer Prize–winning Time/Post crew, elite media operatives who processed leaks of classified information from current and former senior government officials, the McClatchy group consisted of bottom feeders. They published stories that no one at the top of the media food chain would touch.

  “Among the many media stooges for Fusion GPS, McClatchy was the most shameless,” says Jack Langer. “They had a template for stories spoon-fed to them by Fusion GPS, and they just filled in the blanks: ‘A is investigating Trump associate B for the terrible crime of C, according to two sources familiar with the matter.’”

  Between January 2017 and January 2019, a small McClatchy team—including most notoriously Peter Stone and Greg Gordon—distinguished itself with a series of Trump-Russia stories employing a pattern that proudly broke with journalistic standards in order to prosecute a political operation.

  “The McClatchy template was absurd,” says Langer. “They simply claimed, in an extremely vague way, that Mueller or the FBI was investigating some Steele Dossier allegation or some other outlandish Fusion GPS conspiracy theory.”

  Note, for example, McClatchy’s April 13, 2018, story, “Sources: Mueller Has Evidence Cohen Was in Prague in 2016, Confirming Part of Dossier.”

  Much of the story confirming the dossier is largely a retelling of the dossier itself. Further, the article offers no evidence of Cohen’s trip to Prague independent of the account given in the dossier. The report may simply be Fusion GPS repackaging the dossier—the “evidence” in Mueller’s possession—as a news article more than a year after it was first published.

  Langer notes that McClatchy’s stories were also marred by weak sourcing. “It’s not FBI sources or, even more vaguely, law enforcement sources,” he says. “It’s just ‘people familiar with the matter,’ and that could be people who have simply been told something second- or thirdhand. Or it’s just Glenn Simpson and one of his Fusion GPS confederates—they themselves are obviously the ‘people familiar with the matter’ in a lot of these stories.”

  In a March 15, 2018, story, McClatchy journalists Peter Stone and Greg Gordon broke ground on another Fusion GPS conspiracy theory. According to the report:

  Congressional investigators are examining information that an ex–National Rifle Association board member who had done legal work for the group had concerns about its ties to Russia and its possible involvement in channeling Russian funds into the 2016 elections to help Donald Trump, two sources familiar with the matter say.

  The board member was Cleta Mitchell, a campaign finance lawyer in Washington, DC. In a lengthy correspondence with the McClatchy reporters, she denied their account, explaining that she had had no involvement with the NRA since her board term had expired in 2012. She told the reporters repeatedly that the story was false, and
they published it nonetheless.

  Bruce Ohr told Congress that Simpson had been the source of the story about Mitchell and the NRA. Ohr had apparently relayed Simpson’s account to the FBI and other government bodies. Schiff said the Mitchell-NRA story had been a further reason to continue investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election.

  In an email message to the lawyer and journalist Scott Johnson, Mitchell claimed that Simpson lied and that Gordon and Stone acted as willing conduits for his and others’ false statements:

  They were the mouthpiece for the leaks from the FBI about the NRA and the Glenn Simpson lies about me, the NRA, etc.—plus, they were the shills for the Adam Schiff lies from the House Democrats on Intelligence committee. It is a sordid situation—the FBI takes lies from Glenn Simpson, and instead of prosecuting him, they do his bidding and the whole cabal leaks to McClatchy—it is despicable.

  “McClatchy stood by these conspiracy theories, long after they were debunked.” says Langer, “yet the media hailed this dreck as legitimate, bombshell stories. They ignored the weak sourcing, the lack of detail, the objective unlikelihood that these things actually happened, and the fact that McClatchy’s previous ‘bombshell’ stories were untrue. The media simply didn’t care if the reporting was transparently false so long as it furthered the preposterous narrative that Trump and his associates were Russian agents.”

  Even as Nunes put the press on notice, there were still efforts to go after him. In the winter, The New Yorker sent Adam Entous, recently hired away from the Washington Post, and Ronan Farrow to poke around in Nunes’s hometown, Tulare. “Everyone in the Valley knew that they were there to do a hit job on me,” Nunes says. Entous denies he was there to do a story on Nunes.

  The February 18, 2019, story they published about a private Israeli spy firm hired to follow a candidate in a hospital board election had a big hole in it. Like Ryan Lizza’s article about Nunes’s “secret” Iowa farm, it was missing the sensational scoop implicating Nunes that was to hold it all together. Instead, Entous and Farrow came away with a story that read like an oppo research file: names, places, facts, and the outline of a story.

  That was typical of The New Yorker’s signature Trump-Russia reporting, much of which sprang from Fusion GPS research. The magazine’s editor in chief, David Remnick, had been an early adopter of Russiagate. His pre-2016 election article “Trump and Putin: A Love Story,” had used Page and Manafort talking points from the protodossiers.

  Unsurprisingly, The New Yorker was one of the publications that Fusion GPS arranged for Steele to brief prior to the 2016 election. Staff writer Jane Mayer acknowledged in her March 2018 profile that she had been among the “handful of national-security reporters” who had met with the former British spy.

  “Despite Steele’s generally cool manner, he seemed distraught about the Russians’ role in the election,” wrote Mayer. “He did not distribute his dossier, provided no documentary evidence, and was so careful about guarding his sources that there was virtually no way to follow up.”

  But she did follow up, with a profile of Steele as a hero, for which the former British spy, though unnamed, is clearly a source.

  New Yorker writer Adam Davidson published two articles drawing on themes outlined in the undated Fusion GPS protodossier on Trump’s alleged ties to post-Soviet states. His March 13, 2017, article, “Donald Trump’s Worst Deal,” syncs with Fusion GPS’s “Trump in Azerbaijan” report. Davidson’s August 14, 2017, story, “Trump’s Business of Corruption,” runs parallel with Fusion GPS’s “Trump in Georgia” report.

  The article on Azerbaijan reworked the same material gone over in previous “Trump in Azerbaijan” articles published in the Washington Post and by the Associated Press with The New Yorker’s customary flair.

  Davidson followed up with a report a few weeks later after Democrats called for an investigation of the allegations made in his previous article. It was a trademark Fusion GPS operation: credential a story through the press for friendly government officials to open an investigation for the press to then report. Davidson refashioned the Azerbaijan story many times over the next several years, sometimes pushing it in tandem with the Georgia article.

  An October 8, 2018, article by New Yorker writer Dexter Filkins revived the false story holding that Trump Organization computer servers were in secret communications with those of a Russian financial institution, Alfa Bank.

  Fusion GPS had given the story to Franklin Foer for his October 2016 Slate article, which had quickly been debunked. Apparently it was worth recycling now that Fusion GPS had a different funding stream, the Democracy Integrity Project, run by Daniel Jones. The former aide to Senator Dianne Feinstein was a source of the Filkins story, which does not mention Fusion GPS, never mind its role in pushing the Alfa Bank story.

  After the Mueller Report came out, Susan Glasser interviewed Adam Schiff for an April 4, 2019, New Yorker article. “Will history remember the Russia investigation as a hoax,” she asked him, “or as a genuine scandal?” Her question betrayed a discomfort rarely recorded among journalists on the Trump-Russia beat. There was no going back and changing the fact that the media had pushed a conspiracy theory for the past three years.

  Nor would an industrywide apology solve the problem. To admit that the whole thing had been a lie, to acknowledge that the press had waged a political campaign based on a series of criminal leaks of classified information, would still devastate the media’s credibility.

  The larger problem was that the Steele Dossier had become a part of the press. It was no longer just the centerpiece of a conspiracy theory that the press had turned into the biggest story in a generation; rather, the industry had taken the form of the dossier.

  The postdossier era saw a surge of fabricated news stories, all zeroing in on Trump policies.

  After nominated in summer 2018 to the Supreme Court, justice Brett Kavanaugh was targeted by a joint media–Democratic operative smear campaign labeling him a rapist. His accuser, who could not remember the date or place of the alleged assault, was said to be a “credible” witness.

  Schoolboys from a Catholic school in Kentucky visiting Washington, DC, in January 2019 were demonized for wearing MAGA hats. The press reported that they’d harassed an elderly tribal leader, a Vietnam veteran, at the Lincoln Memorial. Social media erupted on cue, with well-known media figures threatening violence. The story was false. The point was to intimidate anyone outside the establishment consensus: this could happen to you, too, even your children.

  After the rogue Saudi Arabian intelligence officer Jamal Khashoggi was murdered by Saudi intelligence officers in October 2018, the press used the story to target Trump foreign policy. Khashoggi was misrepresented as a journalist and US green card holder. The point was to pressure Trump to break with the United States’ ally and major oil producer Saudi Arabia—thereby crashing the world economy and sacrificing hundreds of thousands of American jobs—and restore Obama’s anti-Saudi and pro-Iran policy.

  In August 2019, New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet made clear that the press now believes its central purpose is to run political operations. In a meeting with the entire Times staff, Baquet praised the paper’s Trump-Russia coverage. “That was a really hard story, by the way, let’s not forget that. We set ourselves up to cover that story. I’m going to say it. We won two Pulitzer Prizes covering that story.”

  Those Pulitzers rightly belonged to the DOJ and FBI, which used the Times and the Post as platforms for a criminal campaign of leaks of classified information to prosecute an operation against a sitting president. In spite of the press’s contributions, the coup failed.

  “Our readers who want Donald Trump to go away suddenly thought, ‘Holy shit, Bob Mueller is not going to do it,’” said Baquet. Thus it was the job of the paper’s top editor to prepare the staff for the next anti-Trump campaign. Maybe, as Baquet suggested, describing the president a white supremacist the next two years would drive him from office. If not, the
re would be other opportunities for further operations.

  There was still real news, and the media often covered it, but that was irrelevant. The shape of the press itself was different, twisted into something like a credibility curve diagramming the escalating cost of self-induced delusion and the increasingly steep rise in conspiracism as a worldview.

  And that was the point. If people can be persuaded to believe the perverted dreamworld of the dossier simply because it reflected the thwarted hopes of the ruling class, there is nothing they won’t believe.

  Taking Russiagate as a ground truth was evidence that the collective psyche of the political and cultural elite, as expressed in the media, was broken. No responsible adult could continue to jeopardize the future of his or her family or community by assuming that the press’s representation of the world matched reality. For the US media, the collusion narrative was an extinction-level event.

  In his response to Glasser, Schiff hedged his bet. “The bar is not only what’s criminal,” he told her; “it should also be what’s ethical and what’s right.”

  It’s difficult to lie for as long as Schiff did about Trump and collusion—nearly three years—without believing that lie serves a higher cause. The reason can’t be just partisan politics or power or money. People lie for what seems to them to be ethical reasons until the lie itself becomes their evidence that they are ethical people.

  Russiagate was a lie like that, a collective lie that divided the country, leaving American institutions in ruins while damaging our founding principles, including presumption of innocence. Those responsible needed to be held accountable.

  “They have to admit what they did was wrong,” says Nunes. “And they have to be prosecuted.”