Dude, who stole my Trump-Russia collusion investigation?
Ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, appeared on CNN's State Of The Union today with host Jake Tapper and the interview was much more notable for what was not asked than what was discussed. And what was not asked was anything about Schiff's Trump-Russia collusion investigation. The very absence of this topic screamed loudly since almost everybody now aware of Schiff know him solely because of his role in the investigation to nowhere. This was heightened by the fact that until very recently Schiff would typically be questioned with great hopeful anxiety about how his investigation was going, always with the idea of impeachment not far away.
Here is Tapper asking Schiff about many topics except the one that seemed, until recently, to be his primary mission in life.
So how to explain the very noticeable disappearance of the once highly touted Trump-Russia collusion investigation? Perhaps this is a silent acknowledgement by the mainstream media that the fantasy they once enthusiastically touted has collapsed.
Or at least that's what articles from their side are reporting. Two leftist magazines, The Nation and Salon, are questioning the dominant media narrative. A very detailed report casting doubt on that subject was published on August 9 in The Nation, A New Report Raises Big Questions About Last Year’s DNC Hack:
It is now a year since the Democratic National Committee’s mail system was compromised—a year since events in the spring and early summer of 2016 were identified as remote hacks and, in short order, attributed to Russians acting in behalf of Donald Trump. A great edifice has been erected during this time. President Trump, members of his family, and numerous people around him stand accused of various corruptions and extensive collusion with Russians.
...All this was set in motion when the DNC’s mail server was first violated in the spring of 2016 and by subsequent assertions that Russians were behind that “hack” and another such operation, also described as a Russian hack, on July 5. These are the foundation stones of the edifice just outlined. The evolution of public discourse in the year since is worthy of scholarly study: Possibilities became allegations, and these became probabilities. Then the probabilities turned into certainties, and these evolved into what are now taken to be established truths. By my reckoning, it required a few days to a few weeks to advance from each of these stages to the next. This was accomplished via the indefensibly corrupt manipulations of language repeated incessantly in our leading media.
Lost in a year that often appeared to veer into our peculiarly American kind of hysteria is the absence of any credible evidence of what happened last year and who was responsible for it. It is tiresome to note, but none has been made available. Instead, we are urged to accept the word of institutions and senior officials with long records of deception. These officials profess “high confidence” in their “assessment” as to what happened in the spring and summer of last year—this standing as their authoritative judgment. Few have noticed since these evasive terms first appeared that an assessment is an opinion, nothing more, and to express high confidence is an upside-down way of admitting the absence of certain knowledge. This is how officials avoid putting their names on the assertions we are so strongly urged to accept—as the record shows many of them have done.
We come now to a moment of great gravity.
...Until recently, researchers undertaking this work faced critical shortcomings, and these are to be explained. But they have achieved significant new momentum in the past several weeks, and what they have done now yields very consequential fruit. Forensic investigators, intelligence analysts, system designers, program architects, and computer scientists of long experience and strongly credentialed are now producing evidence disproving the official version of key events last year. Their work is intricate and continues at a kinetic pace as we speak. But its certain results so far are two, simply stated, and freighted with implications:
There was no hack of the Democratic National Committee’s system on July 5 last year—not by the Russians, not by anyone else. Hard science now demonstrates it was a leak—a download executed locally with a memory key or a similarly portable data-storage device. In short, it was an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system. This casts serious doubt on the initial “hack,” as alleged, that led to the very consequential publication of a large store of documents on WikiLeaks last summer.
Forensic investigations of documents made public two weeks prior to the July 5 leak by the person or entity known as Guccifer 2.0 show that they were fraudulent: Before Guccifer posted them they were adulterated by cutting and pasting them into a blank template that had Russian as its default language. Guccifer took responsibility on June 15 for an intrusion the DNC reported on June 14 and professed to be a WikiLeaks source—claims essential to the official narrative implicating Russia in what was soon cast as an extensive hacking operation. To put the point simply, forensic science now devastates this narrative.
The August 15 Salon story by Danielle Ryan references Lawrence's article and explains about the conundrum the MSM put itself into by loudly promoting the Trump-Russia fantasy, What if the DNC Russian “hack” was really a leak after all? A new report raises questions media and Democrats would rather ignore:
As of Aug. 12, the only well-known publications that have followed up on The Nation’s reporting are Breitbart News, the Washington Examiner and New York magazine (which described Lawrence’s article as “too incoherent to even debunk,” and therefore provided no substantial rebuttal). Bloomberg addressed the report in an op-ed by one of its regular columnists.
The silence from mainstream outlets on this is interesting, if for no other reason than the information appears in a highly-regarded liberal magazine with a reputation for vigorous and thorough reporting — not some right-wing fringe conspiracy outlet carrying water for Donald Trump.
Maybe the logic goes that if mainstream journalists leave this untouched, that alone will be enough to discredit it. True believers in the Russian hack narrative can point to Breitbart’s coverage to dismiss this new information without consideration. That is not good enough. Lawrence’s article, and the report behind it, deserves some proper attention.
And as of August 20, Jake Tapper did not ask Adam Schiff about the latest revelations in The Nation.
Instead of subjecting the various accounts of what happened last summer to rigorous scrutiny, the media instantly accepted the narrative promoted by the Clinton campaign and U.S. intelligence agencies. It has continued to do so ever since. Now, as new information comes to light, the media has largely acted as if it did not exist.
For the media and mainstream liberals to dismiss the information presented in Lawrence’s article as lacking in evidence would be breathtakingly ironic, given how little evidence they required to build a narrative to suit themselves and absolve Clinton of any responsibility for losing the election.
...If these new findings are accurate, those who pushed the Russia hacking narrative with little evidence have a lot to answer for. The Clinton campaign promoted a narrative that has pushed U.S.-Russia relations to the brink at an incredibly dangerous time.
...The clear implication here is that anyone who questions what U.S. intelligence agencies “have concluded” is a conspiracy theorist pushing lies on behalf of Trump or Vladimir Putin. It is clear that the DNC expect the matter to be left at that, with no further inquiry from the media or anyone else.
By the looks of things, that’s exactly what will happen.
For the sake of nostalgia let us take a look back at a time in the not very distant past when Adam Schiff was eagerly questioned about the state of the Trump-Russia collusion investigation in which he typically responded with a non-answer.
