The media loves to fact check, yet it operates almost entirely in a fact-free environment. An environment so fact-free that it is governed entirely by tribal ideology in a darkness into which facts have as little access as light does into a vampire’s coffin.
So Trump’s tweets about the FISA application release have predictably spurred a noxious rash of media fact-checking. Or, as it’s more accurately described, spin.
About the only place to spin the FISA application’s contents is into the blacked out and redacted areas of the application. Because the unredacted areas decisively establish that…
1. The FISA application leaned on the Steele dossier, a Clinton campaign product, and derivatives thereof, like the Yahoo News article produced through media contacts.
2. The FISA application did not disclose that the Steele dossier came from the Clinton campaign, only that it might possibly be the work of some political opponent. It insisted on Steele’s reliability even once it was forced to break ties with him over his overt pro-Clinton moves.
3. The FISA application misled on the question of the Yahoo News article, depicting it as a separate source, even when there was no question that it was not. This was done to make it seem as if there were more support for these allegations than just Steele.
4. The FISA application leans heavily on media stories. Now maybe there’s a whole lot of classified information obtained through intel in the redacted sections, but previous rounds of this have shown that the redacted sections usually just contain the more damning material.
There is simply no spin that makes this look good. Short of pinning lefty media hopes on the redacted section, the Saturday night dump was a disaster for Team Coup. And the media’s insistence that Trump’s tweets have no proof isn’t fact checking, it’s wishful thinking.
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