The New York Times makes frenzied efforts to protect Dems from the Russia probe

It’s almost laughable to see the full lies and half-truths the New York Times spins to protect Democrats from the Justice Dept’s escalated Russia probe.

New York Times Lies Russia Investigation Media BiasBecause it’s ostensibly a newspaper, the New York Times felt obligated to report on the fact that the Justice Department is shifting the Russia probe into a criminal inquiry, giving John Durham expanded investigative powers.

Rather than being thrilled that the administration is taking seriously their paranoia about Russian involvement in American politics, the New York Times, official mouthpiece for the Democrat party, is in high dudgeon that Trump would dare to seek to get to the core truth about the matter. In this regard, it’s worth remembering that the Dems spent three years insisting that major crimes had occurred vis-a-vis Russia — provided, of course, that those crimes involved on Trump and anyone who ever worked for him in even the most limited capacity.

While Mueller’s team reluctantly noted that nothing implicated Trump and then tried, instead, to spin an obstruction fantasy, the facts that emerged — not rumor, hearsay, gossip, or fantasy, but facts — revealed that actors in the FBI, the CIA, and other alphabet Deep State agencies had created a hoax that spanned continents, all in an effort to derail Trump’s election and, when that failed, to force him out of office. Armed with information that Glenn Simpson, a journalist first bandied about when trying to knock McCain out of the running in 2008, these operatives lied to a remarkably cavalier FISA court in order to spy on Trump and other Americans for months.

When the facts became undeniable, rather than continue with risible denials, the New York Times last week tried a new tactic: “Okay, okay. It’s true. There is a Deep State working against Trump, but it’s a good Deep State, one composed of ardent patriots who have to destroy the Constitution and commit a coup against a duly elected president in order to save America (for the Democrat party).”

Now that Barr has expanded the probe and is talking in a serious way to people such as Mifsud and Steele, though, even that revamped “good Deep State” argument isn’t going to work. The only thing the Times’ hacks are left with is to smear Trump and Barr and the entire Justice Department.

And that’s where we get to the article I fisk in this post. (This is not a deep fisk. It’s a sarcastic, off-the-top of my head fisk.) The article is dishonest and crude, but people who aren’t paying attention may well take this garbage seriously. From the very first paragraph, the article frames this criminal investigation as part of a Trump vendetta (conveniently forgetting that it was Obama’s Deep State that used a hoax to try to destroy Trump):

For more than two years, President Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked the Russia investigation, portraying it as a hoax and illegal even months after the special counsel closed it. [As noted above, even Mueller’s corrupt team, despite its best efforts and its bullying destruction of individuals associated with Trump, couldn’t make anything stick. Moreover, the known facts show that the whole Russia thing was indeed made up out of whole cloth.] Now, Trump’s own Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into how it all began.

Justice Department officials have shifted an administrative review of the Russia investigation closely overseen by Attorney General William Barr to a criminal inquiry, according to two people familiar with the matter. The move gives the prosecutor running it, John Durham, the power to subpoena for witness testimony and documents, to impanel a grand jury and to file criminal charges.

The opening of a criminal investigation is likely to raise alarms that Trump is using the Justice Department to go after his perceived enemies. [This is not reporting. This is spinning to protect the Democrat party.] Trump fired James Comey, the FBI director under whose watch agents opened the Russia inquiry, and has long assailed other top former law enforcement and intelligence officials as partisans who sought to block his election. [Funnily enough, once the plot fell through, all these same “top” officials dropped even the pretense of impartiality and hired themselves out to MSNBC and CNN to engage in non-stop attacks against Trump and his election’s validity.]

Trump has made clear that he sees the typically independent Justice Department as a tool to be wielded against his political enemies. [Hey, Eric “the New Black Panthers did nothing wrong” Holder and Loretta “don’t indict Hillary” Lynch! I wonder how the NYT got the idea that bad people might use the Justice Department in a corrupt way.] That view factors into the impeachment investigation against him, as does his long obsession with the origins of the Russia inquiry. [“His” long obsession with the Russia inquiry? Really? His? It was the NYT that made “Russia! Russia! Russia!” its unofficial motto. It was MSNBC and CNN that could talk about nothing else. Rachel Madcow was incapable of talking about anything else for three years. So whose obsession are we talking about here?] House Democrats are examining in part whether his pressure on Ukraine to open investigations into theories about the 2016 election constituted an abuse of power. [In other words, once the Russia investigation turned like a boomerang back on the Democrats, suddenly it’s an abuse of power even to talk about it any more.]

The move also creates an unusual situation in which the Justice Department is conducting a criminal investigation into itself. [No, it’s not conducting a criminal investigation into the institution as a whole, which would be investigating itself. It’s conducting an investigation into gross abuses of power by the Department’s prior inhabitants — something appropriate for a non-corrupt administration to do.]

Barr’s reliance on Durham, a widely respected and veteran prosecutor who has investigated CIA torture and broken up Mafia rings, could help insulate the attorney general from accusations that he is doing the president’s bidding and putting politics above justice. [“Oh, my God! Oh, my God! How are we going to spin the fact that Durham as a reputation for being completely incorruptible, not to mention superb at his job?” I could actually sense the flop sweat coming off the NYT’s website when I read that.]

[snip]

Trump is certain to see the criminal investigation as a vindication of the years he and his allies have spent trying to discredit the Russia investigation. [The same Russia investigation that Mueller eventually, and oh so reluctantly, admitted proved that Trump did nothing wrong.] In May, Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity that the FBI officials who opened the case — a counterintelligence investigation into whether his campaign conspired with Moscow’s election sabotage — had committed treason. [Yes, it is treason to use illegal means to try to overthrow a duly elected government. Sorry, NYT. Try to spin your way out of that one.]

“We can never allow these treasonous acts happen to another president,” Trump said. He has called the FBI investigation one of the biggest political scandals in U.S. history.

[snip]

Barr expressed skepticism of the Russia investigation even before joining the Trump administration. [And proved to be right, too, not that the hacks and Pravda weenies at the NYT will ever admit that.] Weeks after being was sworn in this year, he said he intended to scrutinize how it started and used the term “spying” to describe investigators’ surveillance of Trump campaign advisers. But he has been careful to say he wants to determine whether investigators acted lawfully.

“The question is whether it was adequately predicated,” Barr told lawmakers in April. “And I’m not suggesting that it wasn’t adequately predicated. But I need to explore that.”

Barr began the administrative review of the Russia investigation in May, saying that he had conversations with intelligence and law enforcement officials that led him to believe that the FBI acted improperly, if not unlawfully.

[What follows is an amazing series of paragraphs in which the NYT recites the faked-up claims against Trump and then wraps up with a paragraph implying that Mueller found actual wrongdoing directly related to those claims. It is one of the most dishonest pieces of writing I’ve ever seen.]

The FBI opened the investigation in late July 2016, code-named Crossfire Hurricane, after receiving information from the Australian government that a Trump campaign adviser had been approached with an offer of stolen emails that could damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

FBI agents discovered the offer shortly after stolen Democratic emails were released, and the events, along with ties between other Trump advisers and Russia, set off fears that the Trump campaign was conspiring with Russia’s interference.

The FBI did not use information from the CIA in opening the Russia investigation, former U.S. officials said. But agents’ views on Russia’s election interference operation crystallized by mid-August, after the CIA director at the time, John Brennan, shared intelligence with Comey about it.

The CIA did contribute heavily to the intelligence community’s assessment in early 2017 that Russia interfered in the 2016 election and tried to tip it in Trump’s favor, and law enforcement officials later used those findings to bolster their application for a wiretap on a Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page.

The special counsel who took over the Russia investigation in 2017, Robert Mueller, secured convictions or guilty pleas from a handful of Trump associates and indictments of more than two dozen Russians on charges related to their wide-ranging interference scheme.

In his report, Mueller said that he had “insufficient evidence” to determine whether Trump or his aides engaged in a criminal conspiracy with the Russians but that the campaign welcomed the sabotage and expected to benefit from it. [Am I right? Did the preceding paragraphs successfully imply to the uninformed, not that Mueller destroyed lives on process crimes, but that he actually secured substantive convictions related to Trump’s apparently working hand-in-glove with the Russians to win the election?]

There’s a lot more there, but it’s tedious stuff, a careful amalgam of half-truths and full lies, all intended to mislead the credulous, stupid, or biased. It’s also a reminder of something I learned during my days as a litigator: A dishonest counsel, who doesn’t worry about facts, will pack multiple lies into a single sentence. The honest attorney opposing that legal fraud may find that it takes paragraphs to dissect the lies and reveal the truth — and sadly, judges, especially the lazy, biased, activist hacks in the San Francisco Bay Area’s courts, not only don’t have time to discern the truth, but often don’t want to.

Suffice to say that the Democrats are very, very scared that their dishonest and criminal conduct is about to be exposed. To hide their tracks, the NYT has done the journalistic equivalent of running a tractor at warp speed through the Dems own piled-up fecal matter in the hope that the effluvia the tractor tosses in the air will operate to keep honest investigators at a distance. It’s not a smoke screen, it’s a sh*t screen.