The New York Times Can't Stop Sucking

How many times can one newspaper screw up a story?

Predictably, the New York Times pooh-poohed the release of the classified annex to the Durham report. Charlie Savage wrote:

Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, and other Trump allies have declared that a newly declassified report on the Russia investigation provides “evidence that the Clinton campaign plotted to frame President Trump and fabricate the Russia collusion hoax.” The reality is almost precisely the opposite… The report shows that a purported email that Trump supporters have long tried to portray as a smoking gun is instead most likely a fake. Russian spies appear to have tried to make it seem authentic by assembling passages lifted from actual emails by different hacking victims…

Mr. Trump and his aides have coupled those releases with wild and inaccurate claims about what they show, spinning the reports as proof of his long-running narrative that the investigation was a hoax instigated by enemies for political reasons.

This whole “assembled by Russian spies” line is based on one assessment about a pair of emails likely pulled by Russians from other real American victims of hacking. Beyond this instance of a “composite,” the paper ignores the gigantic load of material from the same source, which has been described in multiple other reports as real and affecting numerous American “victims” from the Executive and Legislative branches, as well as think-tanks and NGOs.

More irritating is Savage’s diatribe against Patel and the hoax “narrative,” offered without mentioning the roughly ten million instances in which the Times botched its coverage of Patel and Republican investigations into Russiagate. When Patel and then-House Intelligence Committee chair Devin Nunes released the much-denounced “Nunes memo” about FISA abuse in early 2018, Savage personally “annotated” the document, which would be vidicated more or less entirely by an Inspector General investigation nearly two years later. About the accusations of FISA abuse, which included use of the Steele dossier to obtain surveillance authority, Charlie wrote:

• The FBI had ““grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy,’” adding, “In accusing the F.B.I. of omitting important information, this memo’s critics say the memo itself omits crucial context: other evidence that did not come from Mr. Steele, much of which remains classified.”

  This is the much-used initial argument that the Steele material wasn’t important to the FISA warrant. Savage went with this talking point multiple times, also saying in another piece, “Mr. Steele’s information was only one thread in a tapestry of evidence from various sources that the memo ignored, exaggerating its relative importance.” Inspector General Horowitz dashed that, concluding Steele “played a central and essential role”;

• Savage went on in the “annotation”: “It makes no note of the fact that [Carter] Page attracted the F.B.I.’s interest in 2013, when agents came to believe that Russian spies were trying to recruit him.” Why didn’t Patel include that detail? Because Page was an informant in good standing with the CIA at the time, a fact an FBI lawyer was criminally convicted for omitting. Savage, who later wrote about Kevin Clinesmith’s conviction, omitted the same critical detail as Clinesmith — perhaps unknowingly, but still;

• Savage wrote, “The language used here on Mr. Steele’s relationship with the F.B.I. suggests that it was formal. But he never entered into any formal relationship from which he could be suspended or terminated, according to people familiar...” Steele was terminated as a source by the FBI “for cause” on November 1, 2016*, years before the annotation article, showing Savage’s “people familiar” either weren’t “familiar” or were yanking his chain. Colleague Scott Shane would describe the firing as a decision by the FBI to “end the formal relationship” with Steele. Oops.

For what it’s worth, the Times without Savage’s help also swallowed the Hamilton 68 hoax whole and described the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag as the work of Russian “bots”; ran an editorial called “The Nunes memo is all smoke, no fire”; and ran a full house editorial (one that again cited the phony Hamilton 68 dashboard, by the way) describing the Nunes report as a “fake scandal” designed, like the Clinton email investigation, to distract from the “real conspiracy” investigated by Robert Mueller. This sounds remarkably like today’s story, which described the Durham release as an effort to “change the subject from its broken promise to release Jeffrey Epstein files.” They write the same stories, over and over. It never ends.

The part that really infuriated today, however, was this section:

In reality, the F.B.I. opened its investigation based on a lead it received from the Australian government in late July 2016, after WikiLeaks released Democratic emails stolen by Russian hackers and disrupted the Democratic convention. The tip involved a Trump campaign adviser suggesting, before the hacking had become public, that the campaign had received outreach from Russia and knew what it would do.

This paragraph is an outrage. It’s carefully written to conceal how utterly the Times botched one of the most impactful stories of the Russiagate affair, a story called “How the Russia Inquiry Began: A Campaign Aide, Drinks and Talk of Political Dirt.” This professed to be the origin story of Russiagate, explaining that on July 26th, 2016, four days after Wikileaks leaked thousands of documents damaging to the Democratic Party, Australian authorities told American counterparts about a suspicious Russia-themed conversation Trump aide George Papadopoulos had with a diplomat named Alexander Downer.

The infamous “drinks and dirt” story

The Times reported that Papadopoulos had been told of “dirt” Russia had, in the form of “thousands of emails that would embarrass Mrs. Clinton,” given to him by a Maltese professor named Josef Mifsud, presented as a cutout for Russia. This was described as a “driving factor” for the FBI opening its “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into Trump and Russia on July 31, 2016.

Almost everything about this story was wrong. It took a while, but Downer himself eventually admitted there was no “dirt” talk, or email talk. From the public Durham report:

According to Downer, Papadopoulos made no mention of Clinton emails, dirt or any specific approach by the Russian government to the Trump campaign team with an offer or suggestion of providing assistance. Rather, Downer's recollection was that Papadopoulos simply stated "the Russians have information” and that was all.

Downer also said he “did not get the sense Papadopoulos was the middle-man to coordinate with the Russians.” More infuriating? The FBI dropped Papadopoulos as a lead weeks into the Crossfire Hurricane inquiry, with Deputy Director Andrew McCabe testifying that his comments “didn’t particularly indicate” contact with Russians:

Screwing up “dirt” and “thousands of emails” is bad, but the McCabe testimony shows the FBI knew in in August of 2016 that Papadopoulos was a dead-end. But “current and former American officials” polished that turd and fed it to the Times a full year and a half later. The paper then used it for its blockbuster tale about how Papadopoulos played a “critical role” in the Russiagate drama.

This will go down as an infamous screw-up and smear. Papadopoulos was totally uninvolved with any intelligence scheme and merely used as a technical pretense to start what proved to be a bogus investigation. Still, the Times plastered his face all over its front page as the scandal’s poster child, in what in hindsight was a proud advertisement for how badly they’d been bent over by their sources.

Now, years later, Savage not only re-writes this passage without the name “Papadopoulos” and without references to “dirt” or “thousands of emails,” but uses sleight-of-hand to suggest what was said between the young Trump aide and the Australian diplomat was meaningful. He describes a “Trump campaign adviser suggesting, before the [Russian] hacking had become public, that the campaign had received outreach from Russia and knew what it would do.” Knew what it would do? Savage leaves out the fact that Papadopoulos had not, in fact, received outreach from Russia, and did not have or claim to have foreknowledge of hacking. He played no meaningful role. It’s part of the Times legend that he did, however, so Charlie twisted the prose like a pipe cleaner to fit the few remaining usable factoids.

The irony is that while Papadopoulos was not the real beginning of Russiagate, the story Durham told about the U.S. acquiring a large chunk of intelligence from Russia far earlier in 2016 likely was. This was real intelligence concerning Russia that was embarrassing to Clinton, not Trump. Even at this late date, after so many Russiagate stories the paper screwed up, they continue to vomit up this nonsense. Give back your Pulitzer, you clowns!

*A previous version of this story incorrectly identified the date as the 17th.