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Disclosures by Devin, a MSM Blunder & Likely Leakers

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It’s been a bad week for the mainstream media.

Friday provided a fitting culmination provided by CNN.

The CNN story listed the email date as September 4, 2016.

Prior to the September 13, 2016 public release of the WikiLeaks documents.

MSNBC, CBS and the rest of MSM – quickly picked up the story and ran with it.

Hard.

The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake later discovered CNN got one detail wrong:

This was a huge error by CNN.

CNN reported the email date as September 4, 2016. The second DNC email release happened on September 13, 2016.

The initial CNN story claimed the Trump Campaign received advance – and possibly illegal – access to WikiLeaks documents.

This was incorrect. The actual email date was September 14, 2016 – the day after the documents were publicly leaked.

The email was never opened, nor answered.

It was at this point things began to get…odd:

Which was strange.

Why wouldn’t CNN explain their sourcing problem:

Some had slightly different takes:

Stelter continued to protect the story’s sources:

Many journalists disagreed:

Why would CNN take such a protective stand?

From the “corrected” CNN article:

CNN originally reported the email was released September 4 — 10 days earlier — based on accounts from two sources who had seen the email. The email, which was described to CNN by multiple sources…

Note the language by CNN. Two sources who had seen the email – and described it to CNN.

The “sources” did not have the email in their possession.

Trump Jr. had been in a closed House Intelligence Committee Meeting on Wednesday. It was here that the email referenced by CNN was discussed. As noted by the Post:

The message was one of thousands turned over to the House Intelligence Committee and others investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, emails that included spam and junk emails. Trump Jr. was asked about the email Wednesday, when he spent about seven hours behind closed doors answering questions from members of the committee.

Futerfas [Trump Jr.’s lawyer] said that he and Trump Jr. had been required to surrender their electronic devices during the interview for security reasons. He expressed anger that details of the session leaked out before it had even concluded.

The email leak came from Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee.

Following the CNN story, Futerfas had this to say:

It is profoundly disappointing that members of the House Intelligence Committee would deliberately leak a document, with the misleading suggestion that the information was not public, when they know that there is not a scintilla of evidence that Mr. Trump Jr. read or responded to the email.

We are concerned that these actions, combined with the deliberate and misleading leak of a meaningless email, undermines the credibility of the serious work the House Intelligence Committee is supposedly undertaking.

Which might explain CNN’s “protective” stance for these particular sources.

Hopefully you noted the sarcasm.

Some observers were more direct:

Through all this, a much larger question remained:

Julian Assange posed the same question:

How did three major outlets all get the story wrong – using information from sources they are all still protecting?

Donald Trump Jr. provided a possible answer:

The House Intelligence Committee is comprised of 13 Republican members and 9 Democrat members. Republican Devin Nunes is the Committee Chairman. Democrat Adam Schiff is the Ranking Minority Member.

The leak came from the Democrat side. It would not have gone out without permission.

Adam Schiff is the likely source of the false leak.

He is also a member of the Gang of Eight. You can find out more about Adam Schiff and the Gang of Eight in, Devin Nunes, Classified Intelligence & Adam Schiff’s Political Pretense.

Schiff is less trustworthy than CNN’s reporting.

Others seem to agree with my assessment:

Which means that Schiff – and whoever he brought into his leaking scheme – have reason to be concerned.

Because they got the dates wrong.

There are three possible explanations for what happened.

Explanation one:

Each of the 9 Democrat House Intelligence Committee members in the hearing examined the Trump Jr. email and somehow all 9 Democrats got September 14, 2016 confused with September 4, 2016.

Explanation two:

Schiff decided to lie to CNN about the date in order to push a collusion narrative.

Explanation three:

They were looking at emails that really did say September 4, 2016. They got played.

I don’t know what the true answer is. But I do recall an interview with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

On August 6, 2017, a very interesting interview with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein caught my eye. So much so that I wrote about it the next day. I was struck by Rosenstein’s composure. He answered each question carefully and gave only information he wanted to. He also made several important points:

We’ve created a new unit within the FBI to focus on those leaks, and we’re going to devote whatever resources are necessary to get them under control.

If we identify somebody, no matter what their position is, if they violated the law, in that case it warrants prosecution, we’ll prosecute them. Including anybody who breaks the law.

We’re going to devote the resources we need to identify who is responsible for those leaks and who has violated the law and hold them accountable.

This same interview contains some very interesting discussion of Special Counsel Mueller’s Investigation.

Rod Rosenstein was not appointed as Attorney General by the Department of Justice. He was not appointed by Congress. Or even AG Jeff Sessions.

Rosenstein was appointed as Deputy Attorney General by President Trump.

On Friday, December 8, 2017, Devin Nunes gave an interview to Fox News. He made a number of notable comments:

We have had an ongoing investigation into DOJ [Department of Justice] and FBI since mid-summer for both FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court] abuse and other matters that we can’t get into too much. But it is very concerning.

I believe there’s evidence that abuses have occurred.

I hate to use the word corrupt, but they become so dirty that, who is watching the watchmen? Who is investigating these people? There is no one.

We have no evidence of Russian collusion between the Trump campaign.

The ethics complaint was a joke from the beginning, designed, purely designed to remove me as the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, which they were unable to do. I think, a clear design from the left, working in conjunction with parts of our government to keep information away from me and the House Intelligence Committee.

One last thing.

On Wednesday, December 6, 2017, Devin Nunes was fully cleared by the House Ethics Committee over almost laughable allegations that Nunes had made unauthorized disclosures in relation to the Obama Administration’s surveillance of the Trump Campaign.

It’s a complicated story but Nunes did nothing wrong. Meanwhile, Adam Schiff proved himself to be particularly duplicitous during the whole affair.

You can read about the entire series of events here.

Adam Schiff’s false public statements led to Nunes being investigated.

The clearance of Nunes likely means he is no longer recused in the Russian Investigation and has full power as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

Donald Trump Jr.’s House Intelligence Committee meeting occurred on Wednesday, December 6, 2017.

The same day that Nunes was cleared…

 

For those interested in an honest and scathing examination of the CNN email story – from a liberal writer – I suggest you read Glenn Greenwald’s piece, The U.S. Media Suffered it’s Most Humiliating Debacle in Decades. It’s an enlightening and worthwhile read.

 

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