Media figures who exposed illegal surveillance, manufactured intelligence, and other abuses in the Trump-Russia investigation almost always paid a price Three years ago, on February 25th, 2021, Aaron Maté at RealClearInvestigations ran “In Final Days, Trump Gave Up on Forcing Release of Russiagate Files, Nunes Prober Says.” Extensively quoting former Principal Deputy to the Acting Director of National Intelligence Kash Patel, Aaron wrote a section on “Assessing the ‘Intelligence Community Assessment,’” detailing a lot of the same story Michael Shellenberger, Alexandra Gutentag and I ran in Public and Racket Thursday. Describing a 2018 House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) report on the subject, Aaron wrote:
The March 2018 House report found that the production of the ICA “deviated from established CIA practice.” And the core judgment that Putin sought to help Trump, the House report found, resulted from “significant intelligence tradecraft failings that undermine confidence in the ICA judgments.”
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Many of us who followed this story — a number of reporters on both sides of the aisle did so obsessively — have long had a good idea about the general direction of that House investigation. The tale of improper CIA and FBI surveillance mixed with manufactured intelligence has been in the ether since late 2017 and early 2018.
I’ll list just a few of the names who reported stories in this direction over the years, in some cases day after day on broadcast shows. An attentive reader will notice nearly everyone on the list has been denounced at some point by the mainstream commentators who got this story horribly wrong. Aaron, considered a traitor by former mainstream colleagues, faced pressure from staff at The Nation, was denounced by The Guardian as part of a “network of conspiracy theorists,” and failed to gain support from any major media outlet or press advocacy organization when the FBI passed on an outrageous request from Ukrainian secret services to remove him from Twitter.
Others who got this story right but were singled out for dismissal or ridicule include:
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