Is the Media Laundering Illegally Obtained Info for Mueller and the FBI?
These days the media operates much more like an intelligence agency than anything else.
In the case of private companies like Fusion GPS, the intel part is explicit. And then there’s the collusion with foreign governments.
Earlier this year, Elliot Broidy, a Trump ally and Republican fundraiser, was targeted by Qatari hackers. Broidy had been sharply critical of the terror state which has been linked to everything from 9/11 to Iran. And his emails were quickly peddled to media figures who spun them into pro-Qatari hit pieces.
When Broidy struck back with a lawsuit targeting Qatar and its lobbyists, phone records showed that LoBianco had spoken three dozen times to a registered foreign agent of the Islamic terror state.
In his story, LoBianco wrote of a “cache of emails obtained by the AP.” The emails are described as having been “anonymously leaked.” A more factually accurate term would have been “hacked” or “stolen.” And LoBianco and the AP had no problem with posting these stolen emails online.
In last week’s piece, Sex, Lies and the Deep State, I noted that some media tactics were starting to resemble those used by foreign spies.
How significant was the Ali Watkins and James Wolfe affair? Former New York Times editor Jill Abramson, in her furious defense of Watkins, noted, “most crucially, the value of her journalism (her Carter Page scoop in BuzzFeed actually helped lead to appt of Mueller).
Watkins’ media employers used the young reporter as a conduit to her older married lover and the leaked information he allegedly provided her.
BuzzFeed, Politico, the Huffington Post and the New York Times were aware of the Watkins affair. As the Times piece on Watkins coolly put it, “Their relationship played out in the insular world of Washington, where young, ambitious journalists compete for scoops while navigating relationships with powerful, often older, sources.” Usually it’s enemy governments that employ young women having an affair with older married government officials to extract information on Intelligence Committee proceedings.
And now back to the AP which somehow got hold of the code to Manafort’s locker.
Two FBI memos obtained by the legal team of President Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, appear to indicate that Justice Department officials exchanged information about their probe with Associated Press reporters, Politico reports. While Manafort’s lawyers are attempting to argue that the reporters were leaked information about the investigation during the April 2017 meeting, violating Justice Department policies and possibly the law, the APreporters also apparently gave the FBI information in return — including the access code for a storage unit where Manafort kept records of his business dealings.
How would the AP have gotten hold of the storage code to a private locker? Unless they had a source that the FBI didn’t, a source Manafort trusted with the code, the alternative answers involve some more direct forms of spying.
Or, quite possibly, it was the FBI that illicitly obtained the code. And the media is acting to once again launder abuses by Obama’s people in the FBI.
Look at it this way.
There’s a high level of scrutiny on law enforcement and how it obtains evidence. Especially in a criminal case. But courts have an equally high level of respect for the media’s ability to protect its sources.
And that makes the media perfect for laundering illicitly obtained information from the FBI.
All the FBI had to do was “secretly” pass along materials to the media whose sources and methods it didn’t want scrutinized in a court of law. Then the media feeds back the material to the FBI. And the media becomes the source. And interrogating the media’s sources is much more legally challenging.
is this sort of source laundering going on? It wouldn’t surprise me at all and it’s worth looking into.
We know there was a good deal of eavesdropping going on. Laundering that information through the media would be an effective way of covering up Obama’s Watergate.
Source: FrontPage Mag
