NYT, WaPo, and even CNN had moments of hot fire throughout the election. The problem was that no one seemed to care at the time.
This exactly.
And even so, I’ll admit that there were also times when all three engaged in some stupid false equivalency as well. It happens. A lot of Trump v Hillary put journalism in uncharted territory.
That being said, maybe not so ludicrous is the idea that once the GOP leadership is assured that Mike Pence is in the clear on everything, the Trump presidency might see the dam burst.
I think we may be witnessing those first cracks. Just speculation, of course.
Yep, same on my part as far as speculation. But once the Republican leadership determines that:
- Pence is in the clear on this, and
- They can push tax cuts on the wealthy with President Pence in power and
- They can’t do shit right now with this Trump story dominating the media…
…things could get interesting, fast.
And the Anti-Hillary crowd shrugs, and then marks it down as a win either way.
None of this comes as much of a surprise to those who were following the election closely. It was certainly reported that Trump was surrounded by pro-Russia advisors and that those advisors had links to Russia that wouldn’t stand up.
When Manafort and Carter Page were booted from the campaign (remember them?) plenty of people said, “But what about Flynn or Miller [Edit: Not Miller, see below]? They’re in the same pro-Russia camp. How long till they go?” All of this was in the press at the time.
But it never got the attention of the people who mattered - the voters. Why not?
- Most of the coverage of it was on for-politics-nerds-only Web sites, or the figurative inner pages of Serious News Outlets like WaPo and NYT.
- In print, if there were 1,000 words in five different stories about five different suspicious aspects of the Trump campaign, then by God there would be 1,000 words on But Her Emails or OMG She Has A Cold. “Balance” was treasured above accurately reporting that there was far, far more hinky about the Trump campaign than the Clinton campaign.
- TV barely covered it, giving it only a scant glance. CNN would devote two hours to a Trump rally, then five minutes to “Questions linger about Trump advisors” - and that would just be five minutes of a Trump surrogate issuing flat-out denials and saying But Her Emails, with no actual reporting.
- The media seemed to believe that the public didn’t care about foreign affairs or Russia. And this was probably true. Russia had been off the average American’s political radar for some time. Meanwhile, there was not shortage of other, more attractive campaign baubles for the press to dangle in front of the public, like Pussygate or Comey’s shenanigans.
- The public simply couldn’t believe it. They assumed this had to be more political theater, like But Her Emails. What was needed was for prominent media outlets and people to slap the public hard and say, This isn’t reality TV, this is real. A Presidential campaign has actually been compromised by a foreign power and that didn’t happen in time. Some of this is on the media (CNN again), but it goes beyond that. The FBI and Congress knew about it - and kept it from the public. The Republican party decided that getting elected was more important than protecting the country. All of our major institutions failed.
TLDR: there was plenty of signage but we drove off the cliff anyway.
What connection does Miller have? I just thought he was an alt-right tool.
[quote]Several of Mr. Trump’s associates, like Mr. Manafort, have done business in Russia, and it is not unusual for American businessmen to come in contact with foreign intelligence officials, sometimes unwittingly, in countries like Russia and Ukraine, where the spy services are deeply embedded in society. Law enforcement officials did not say to what extent the contacts may have been about business.
Officials would not disclose many details, including what was discussed on the calls, which Russian intelligence officials were on the calls, and how many of Mr. Trump’s advisers were talking to the Russians. It is also unclear whether the conversations had anything to do with Mr. Trump himself.[/quote]
There needs to be more beef forthcoming, no? I feel like the article is mostly wind-up and little punch, but maybe I’m missing something.
(Googles for a bit) Hmmm, plenty of nasty connections to Sessions and Breitbart … but no Russia connection I can see. So my mistake, I retract him.
(He came up a lot in connection with Manafort last year when Manafort was running the campaign, and I probably confused Miller and Carter Page back then.)
Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m going to argue here that they CAN corroborate it or else they wouldn’t have leaked the info to the press.
@triggercut et al., I understand what a political shitstorm it would have been, however, can we agree that even the thought that Russia might be successfully influencing the election is pretty damned extraordinary.
Call me naïve if you like, I won’t disagree, but I find it untenable that waiting until the damage was done, until after our election might have been compromised, was the right decision.
@humanton that explanation makes sense to me. I wasn’t following everything that was going on prior to the election to the extent I’m trying to now. Hell, I’m among the fools that thought the very notion of trump as a candidate was so absurd that he couldn’t possibly win. And while I did vote, I suspect that many people stayed home because they thought going was pointless. Is that the media’s fault? No, but I think that Trump is right when he says the press did an awful lot to question the legitimacy of his candidacy.
I tend to agree, and honestly if this turns out as bad as the worst constructions make it out to be, I’m rather at sea. I don’t think I’m altogether prepared, psychologically, to believe such a thing even possible. It’s all unbearably depressing and disorienting, which I supposed is what a good intelligence op is meant to be. Just… y’know… we’re AMERICA, for God’s sake. The remnants of reflexive patriotism in my soul are pretty well rattled. Yet no particular reason to believe our system would be immune to the kind of things we inflicted on other governments in the past.
Could Obama have done more, but didn’t? Is our partisan politics so grotesquely broken that sitting members of the United States Senate would rather have cloven to party than united against a clear and present danger to the body politic? If indeed such questions deserve nothing more than cynical hollow laughter, well… ugh. Just, ugh.
Only left leaning types read tonight’s news and then think “Man, Democrats are to blame for this.”
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo was in the vanguard of publicizing the Trump - Putin links, and it’s worth taking a look at this article he published waaay back in July on them. It ends with:
There is something between a non-trivial and a substantial amount of circumstantial evidence for a financial relationship between Trump and Putin or a non-tacit alliance between the two men. Even if you draw no adverse conclusions, Trump’s financial empire is heavily leveraged and has a deep reliance on capital infusions from oligarchs and other sources of wealth aligned with Putin. That’s simply not something that can be waved off or ignored.
The key thing seven months later is: none of the financial links have been investigated yet. Congress could and should be finding out whether Trump is in hock to Putin-controlled cronies.
Any time I start to question the motives of the Republican Party I remind myself they confirmed Betsy fucking DeVos as Secretary of Education.
I know it sounds silly, but I feel like our way of life is under attack. And yet, most of the damage is being done by ourselves to each other. It’s like we’re all in some Twilight Zone episode like “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street”, except instead of the power, the aliens (Russians) are manipulating the media and our country tears itself to shreds.
And the continued silence by the intelligence agencies is allowing this to happen. Yet, ultimately it is the members of society that are ultimately at fault.
What silence are you talking about?
Remember that the intel and state department are PART of the executive branch. They serve under the President. They can report their findings and knowledge when placed under oath by a congressional investigation, but they cannot act proactively without being, basically, a third-world style coup.
They can’t come out publicly against the President. There are all sorts of back-channel ways to reveal damaging information though and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if a lot of what’s coming out was from them.
I said when Trump got elected that picking a fight with the intelligence services and State was unwise. They’ve been fucking up governments for a lot longer than he has. If only he’d listened to me!
Tucker Carlson is trying to say that the real problem here is the government spying on private citizens and then leaking the results to the press.
So lolz at that.