Mainstream Media is Dead
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US senator blasts mainstream media for hyping the fake Russiagate hysteria and the FBI for spying on President Trump using biased information
Monday’s bombshell Durham Report shows not only that the FBI improperly launched the ‘Russiagate’ probe to prevent Donald Trump from being elected president, but also that legacy media outlets won accolades for hyping the false scandal with politically motivated lies, US Senator Lindsey Graham has claimed.
“What have we learned from the Durham Report? That the New York Times and Washington Post were given a Pulitzer Prize for writing a bunch of politically motivated crap,” Graham said on Tuesday in a Fox News interview. “When it comes to reporting on Donald Trump, the mainstream media is dead.”
Graham, a South Carolina Republican, argued that the media outlets should give back their awards because the entire Russiagate episode was based on falsehoods and an anti-Trump political agenda. The 300-page report released on Monday by US special counsel John Durham found that the FBI didn’t have adequate evidence to justify its so-called ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ investigation and didn’t bother to corroborate suspect information provided by Trump’s political enemies.
Graham said Durham’s findings were “devastating and damning to the rule of law in America,” but legacy media outlets and Democratic Party leaders have declined to take it seriously. He called on US Attorney General and FBI director Christopher Wray to apologize to the people whose lives were ruined by Crossfire Hurricane.
“Wouldn’t it be nice for the agency to apologize to those that their lives were ruined?” Graham asked. “Wouldn’t it be nice for Garland to pick up the phone and say, ‘I’m sorry this happened to you’? Wouldn’t it be nice for the press to admit, ‘We got it wrong’. None of that’s going to happen.”
Instead, the senator said, Republicans will get angry, and millions of Americans will doubt the integrity of the US justice system. “This is generational damage to the FBI,” said Graham, who ran against Trump in the 2016 presidential election. “It’s going to be hard to convince anybody who’s a conservative or middle-of-the-road person that the FBI’s on the up and up, particularly if they’ve still got their thumb on the scale regarding the Hunter Biden investigation.”
Democrats and media outlets are marginalizing the Durham Report because “they just want to get Trump, and they don’t give a damn how you do it,” Graham said. He added that the Trump associates who were harmed by Crossfire Hurricane should “sue the hell” out of federal law enforcement authorities.
“Someone needs to be held accountable for using the law as a political weapon and ruining innocent peoples’ lives.”
Durham’s declaration is primarily a reference to the ‘Steele Dossier’, a compilation of bogus rumors about the former president and his alleged links to Russia that was gathered by a former British intelligence agent on the payroll of the Hillary Clinton campaign.
The dossier kickstarted the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation against Trump in 2016 – codenamed ‘Crossfire Hurricane’, which would spiral into Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s ‘Russiagate’ investigation. Mueller would later find that no collusion occurred between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.
The Steele Dossier was used by the FBI to obtain court permission to spy on Trump’s campaign. The FBI made “basic, fundamental, and serious errors” in applying for a warrant to surveil Trump, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz declared in 2019.
“There was significant reliance on investigative leads provided or funded (directly or indirectly) by Trump’s political opponents,” Durham wrote in his report. “The Department did not adequately examine or question these materials and the motivations of those providing them, even when at about the same time the Director of the FBI and others learned of significant and potentially contrary intelligence.”
“Based on the review of Crossfire Hurricane and related intelligence activities, we conclude that the Department and the FBI failed to uphold their mission of strict fidelity to the law,” he stated.
Durham did not, however, recommend that the FBI make any “wholesale changes” to how it handles politically sensitive investigations.
‘Crossfire Hurricane’ and the subsequent Mueller probe cast a long shadow over Trump’s term in office, with allegations of “Russian collusion” persisting in the media even after Mueller’s report found nothing to back them up. Durham was appointed by Attorney General Bill Barr in 2019 to investigate the origins of what Trump termed “the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax,” and given special counsel status to allow him to continue to work after President Joe Biden took office.
His investigation led to three criminal cases being brought, none of them against senior FBI or Justice Department officials. Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, and Igor Danchenko – one of Steele’s sources – were both acquitted by Washington courts on charges of lying to the agency, while FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith was sentenced to community service for lying while securing a wiretapping warrant for former Trump advisor Carter Page.
Reacting to Durham’s report, CNN anchor Jake Tapper said on Monday that the document was “devastating to the FBI and to a degree, it does exonerate Donald Trump.”
“In other words,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform, “the American public was scammed.”
Source Fox News/RT/AP
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