The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
Tag: michael isikoff
On Sunday News Shows, Trump’s Latest Russia Problem Almost Ignored

On Sunday News Shows, Trump’s Latest Russia Problem Almost Ignored

CNN’s Jake Tapper was the only Sunday show host on September 25 to discuss a report that American intelligence officials are probing Russian government ties to a man Trump has identified as a foreign policy adviser, Carter Page. This latest revelation is yet another missed opportunity by the Sunday political talk shows to feature investigative stories about Trump and his campaign over the past month.

On September 23, Yahoo! News’ Michael Isikoff reported that “U.S. intelligence officials are seeking to determine whether an American businessman identified by Donald Trump as one of his foreign policy advisers has opened up private communications with senior Russian officials.” Among the problematic contacts Page has reportedly had with aides to Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, is Igor Diveykin, who “is believed by U.S. officials to have responsibility for intelligence collected by Russian agencies about the U.S. election.” The article also quoted a Trump spokesperson calling Page an “‘informal foreign adviser’” to Trump.

In an interview with Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway on CNN’s State of the Union, Tapper cited the Yahoo! News article and questioned Conway if the campaign had talked to Page about his meetings with Russian officials. Conway denied that Page was part of the Trump campaign at this time and said that he was not authorized to talk to Russia on the campaign’s behalf.

The other Sunday hosts — NBC’s Chuck Todd, CBS’ John Dickerson, Fox’s Chris Wallace, and ABC’s George Stephanopoulos — who interviewed Trump adviser Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s running mate Mike Pence, and Conway, respectively — all failed to question their Trump surrogate guests about the report. The only other mentions of the report on the Sunday shows were from Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s surrogates, with Clinton running mate Tim Kaine alluding to the “news of this past week [that] shows us a whole series of very serious questions about Donald Trump’s ties to Russia” on CBS’ Face the Nation, and Clinton’s press secretary Brian Fallon mentioning Page on CNN’s Reliable Sources.

The near blackout of this story from the Sunday shows is turning into a familiar pattern regarding investigative reports on Trump. Over the past month, the Sunday political talk shows have repeatedly failed to feature new reporting that reflects poorly on Trump. On September 4, just days after The Washington Post broke the story that Trump’s foundation illegally gave a political donation in 2013 and that Trump paid the IRS a penalty for it, only CBS’ Dickerson brought it up; on other shows, guests were forced to mention it.

The next week, as they were all covering the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, every Sunday show completely ignored theNew York Daily News’ investigation that revealed Trump unethically accepted $150,000 in government aid after the attacks and that Trump bragged that one of his buildings was now the largest in the area just hours after the 9/11 attacks.

And just last week, the Sunday shows again mostly omitted new reporting on Trump, specifically the news that New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman was investigating Trump’s charitable foundation over concerns of impropriety and Kurt Eichenwald’s Newsweek report that detailed the “serious conflicts of interest and ethical quagmires” that would be present in the foreign policy of a President Trump due to his deep business ties to foreign countries and businesspeople.

The report on Page also follows Trump’s repeatedpraise of Putin, who he has called “highly respected within his own country and beyond,” later adding that if Putin “says great things about me, I’m going to say great things about him.” Journalists have slammed Trump for his remarks, noting the country has targeted and murdered journalists.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters for America.

 IMAGE: Carter Page, a businessman identified by Donald Trump as a foreign policy adviser to his presidential campaign/TASS
Latest Gowdy Fakery: Name Of CIA Source In Clinton Email Was No Secret

Latest Gowdy Fakery: Name Of CIA Source In Clinton Email Was No Secret

For anyone disappointed by the absence of troubling material from Hillary Clinton’s emails – not to mention the cratering of the House Select Committee on Benghazi — Michael Isikoff provided a moment of hope last Monday on Morning Joe. According to the Yahoo News investigative correspondent, one of the emails newly released by the Benghazi committee was “evidence of the commission of a federal crime by someone, not Hillary Clinton,” because it included the name of a CIA source in Libya.

Even more thrilling, to some people at least, was the identity of the supposedly incriminating message’s author: none other than Clinton’s often-demonized friend Sidney Blumenthal (who also happens to be a friend of mine).

“This is maybe the single most problematic email exchange we’ve seen with Hillary Clinton yet of all the emails that have been raised,” explained Isikoff. “What you have there is Blumenthal telling the secretary that somebody at the CIA gave the name of a sensitive human intelligence source to somebody who wasn’t at the CIA.”

Certainly this appeared to be a damaging story, if accurate – but its origin in Rep. Trey Gowdy’s discredited outfit should have raised immediate suspicion. Had any of the journalists covering Gowdy checked carefully, we might have learned earlier what we now know: The CIA had reviewed that same email at the behest of the State Department before it was released and “made no redactions to protect classified information.”

In other words, Blumenthal’s email naming a certain Libyan political figure – the late dictator Muammar Qaddafi’s former intelligence chief Moussa Koussa — did not disclose any classified information, let alone intelligence secrets.

So why did Isikoff – and other credulous journalists – consider that March 18, 2011 email so damaging to Clinton and Blumenthal? Evidently because Gowdy or his staff had redacted the name of the former Libyan official themselves — while adding the usual CIA phrase “redacted due to sources and methods” for dramatic emphasis. As released, the document seemed to show that the agency had blacked out the man’s name to protect a source. That was an intentional deception, reminiscent of the dirty trick that got David Bossie fired from the staff of the House Oversight Committee.

On Sunday, Rep. Elijah Cummings, the Benghazi committee’s ranking Democrat, sent a stinging letter to Gowdy, which noted that the Republican chairman had accused Clinton of receiving “classified information from Blumenthal—information she should have known was classified at the time she received it,” and that Clinton had then “forwarded that information to a colleague — debunking her claim that she never sent any classified information from her private email address.”

Wrote Cummings: “To further inflate your claim, you placed your own redactions over the name of the individual with the words, ‘redacted due to sources and methods.’  To be clear, these redactions were not made, and these words were not added, by any agency of the federal government responsible for enforcing classification guidelines… Contrary to your claims, the CIA yesterday informed both the Republican and Democratic staffs of the Select Committee that they do not consider the information you highlighted in your letter to be classified.”

So here is yet another absurd episode, humiliating both for Gowdy and the journalists who promoted this fraudulent story and highly reminiscent of the bogus “criminal referral” leak that made the front page of the New York Times last summer.

This latest episode is even more clownish than it seems at first glance, however. Far from being secret, the close connection between Moussa Koussa and US intelligence was detailed, at great length, more than eight years ago in former CIA director George Tenet’s memoir, At the Center of the Storm (HarperCollins 2007), which was reviewed by CIA censors before publication, of course.

Koussa’s CIA ties came up again in March 2011 during Libya’s bloody civil war, reported in an excellent story on NBC News’ website by senior investigative producer Robert Windrem, just weeks before Koussa defected to the West. (It is worth noting that Windrem’s story appeared while Isikoff still worked at NBC News.) And on March 17, 2011, one day before Blumenthal sent the Koussa email to Clinton, the New York Times published a story by Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane reporting on the Libyan intelligence chief’s post-9/11 cooperation with the CIA.

Nevertheless, in Gowdy’s effort to stir fake outrage over the Blumenthal email, he described the Koussa disclosure in apocalyptic terms: “This information, the name of a human source, is some of the most protected information in our intelligence community, the release of which could jeopardize not only national security but human lives.”

But when his committee released the full email to the press, Gowdy’s own staffers failed to redact Koussa’s name from the subject line – so it was Gowdy, not Blumenthal or Clinton, who released that “most protected information” to the press and public.

By the way, there is one more angle on Moussa Koussa that sheds a darkly comical light on Gowdy’s deep concern for his security. As Tenet explained in his book, the former Libyan intelligence chief is believed by Western intelligence services to have ordered the bombing of PanAm Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988, killing 259 passengers and crew. So Koussa was probably a murderous terrorist, too.

But at least he isn’t Hillary Clinton or one of her friends.

UPDATE: In a new post, Isikoff reports that Gowdy’s committee tried to “cover its tracks” after outing Koussa — and examines the context of Koussa’s relationship with the CIA.

Photo: Rep. Trey Gowdy (House GOP via Flickr)

Whitewater Redux: ‘Serious Crimes,’ Vague Insinuations, And Real Facts

Whitewater Redux: ‘Serious Crimes,’ Vague Insinuations, And Real Facts

If we must dredge up Whitewater, as Michael Isikoff does on Yahoo! today, then let’s be specific instead of vague – or at least not as vague as Isikoff. The occasion for reviving the old Clinton-era pseudo-scandal is a new book by Robert Fiske, the first special prosecutor to work on that probe before a panel of right-wing judges appointed Kenneth W. Starr to replace him.

Let’s begin with the headline, which struck me as misleading, perhaps intentionally. “First Whitewater Prosecutor Says ‘Serious Crimes’ Were Uncovered In Probe” is a statement carefully crafted to suggest that the investigation revealed felonies committed by either Bill or Hillary Clinton or both. Of course, there were none. Instead, the Clintons lost money in the land deal and became the victims of crimes committed by others, notably their Whitewater business partner James McDougal and Hillary’s former law partner Webb Hubbell.

That isn’t news.

Nor is the relevant quote from Fiske: “There was never any evidence that was sufficient to link the Clintons to any of it, but there were certainly serious crimes.”

Yet that clear exoneration obviously didn’t satisfy Isikoff, who spent years pursuing the Whitewater myth as an investigative reporter for Newsweek. No doubt he would like to vindicate his Herculean effort, which produced nothing of value beyond a $50 million bill to the taxpayers, a sordid sex scandal, and a failed impeachment.

In his book, Fiske complains at length about his removal and replacement by Starr, insisting that he and his prosecutorial team would have wrapped up the investigation much sooner. But the former United States Attorney also tells Isikoff that he believed in the credibility of David Hale, the main witness against President Clinton, whose legal bills and living expenses were long subsidized by the president’s enemies as part of the “Arkansas Project.” (Although Isikoff attempts to bolster Hale, his nefarious role as the instrument of a conspiracy against the president and First Lady is thoroughly documented in The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign To Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton, which I co-authored with Gene Lyons.)

Starr presumably believed Hale too, or wanted to. But because Hale was a convicted felon and a known liar, there was no way to use his testimony against Clinton without corroborating evidence. And despite coercive prosecutions of other witnesses and a multi-million-dollar investigation, not a shred of further evidence ever came to light.

What Isikoff omits from this Whitewater redux is the conclusive evidence that other investigators uncovered – most notably, the exhaustive three-volume report compiled by the San Francisco law firm of Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro at the behest of the federal Resolution Trust Corporation.

Leading the law firm’s probe was Jay Stephens, a Republican lawyer whom Clinton had dismissed in 1993 as U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. Based on the Clintons’ sworn interrogatories, interviews with 45 other witnesses, and more than 200,000 pages of documents, the Pillsbury report found that the Clintons had told the truth in every significant detail. McDougal had deceived and cheated them. They had lost $43,000 on the deal. They had known nothing about McDougal’s fraudulent misconduct.

Journalists, pundits and propagandists obsessed with Whitewater did their best to ignore the Pillsbury findings. A year after their release, in December 1996, Isikoff co-authored an embarrassing Newsweek cover story hyping Starr as “The Most Dangerous Man In Washington,” featuring the promise of indictments “that could very possibly alter the course of Bill Clinton’s second term.” The product of another “exclusive interview” with Starr, the lengthy article included a list of alleged crimes imaginatively attributed to the Clintons and their aides by the Newsweek reporters.

Two months later, Starr – predictably unable to “deliver” an indictment against either Clinton — suddenly resigned. With the president’s re-election in November 1996, the independent counsel’s ill-concealed political purpose had reached an ignominious end.

With Hillary Clinton as a potential political target in 2016, Isikoff will keep recycling this tired material for the foreseeable future, no doubt. But this time, somebody at Yahoo! – an editor? – might require him to report all of the evidence.