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Today’s news that PM Scott Morrison is sending Malcolm Turnbull to another of those chinwags that keep CO2’s foes permanently airborne, jetting from this fret fest to the next, makes one wonder why journalists bother to make stuff up. Yet despite real life being so much more bizarre, they persist, as Powerline’s Scott Johnson detailed in a recent address to a US legal convention.
Johnson ‘s prime examples are two — the bid to bring down George W. Bush via what came to be called Rathergate and, more recently, a Russiagate sideshow orchestrated by the same people whose meticulously framed dossiers and bogus documents immediately persuaded those predisposed to the notion that Donald Trump, apart from being the Spawn of Satan, is also the lackey and vassal of Vladimir Putin.
In what is perhaps the pithiest summation of Russiagate’s genesis ever produced by hand or keyboard, Johnson writes:
The Russia hoax is a product of the Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee. They worked through Glenn Simpson and his opposition research firm Fusion GPS. Since the campaign Simpson and Fusion GPS have continued to retail the Russia hoax with the financial support of a Democratic outfit called the Penn Quarter Group, run by former Dianne Feinstein staffer Dan Jones.
Fusion GPS is a firm that does opposition research for hire. Glenn Simpson is the former Wall Street Journal investigative reporter who is a principal and co-founder of the firm. Simpson’s work for the Clinton campaign and the DNC took place with funds laundered by the Perkins Coie law firm — a cutout that was to guard against the disclosure of the source of the work. We weren’t supposed to know. Simpson hired former British intelligence official Christopher Steele to lend him a hand with his Russian sources. We weren’t supposed to know.
Simpson and Fusion GPS have continued to peddle the Russia hoax to Congress and the media. They planted the March 15 McClatchy news story by Peter Stone and Greg Gordon on the prominent Washington attorney Cleta Mitchell….
What follows is a lesson for any conservative who must deal with the media. As the documents reproduced in the embedded panel of the Powerline post attest, two dopey, self-important journalists traded their integrity, such as it may have been, for a faux scoop and, presumably, a pat on the head from the manufacturer of the lies they so willingly propagated.
The entire piece can be read via this link or the one below.
