The Legacy Media Spins Monday's Impeachment Farce and the FISA Abuse Report

Monday was a banner day for news. First of all, the Democrats’ impeachment lynch mob dominated the morning news. The hearing was supposed to be “evidence day,” but Adam Schiff, who led the “impeachment inquiry” (a/k/a star chamber) didn’t even show up!

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Once again, no direct evidence of impeachable offenses was introduced by the Democrats. Zip, zero, nada. But they did spin a yarn about the President’s supposedly horrible offenses based on the same old hearsay and personal opinions from their witnesses who testified before the Schiff’s star chamber.

They even introduced a video snippet of the President making that joke during the 2016 when he asked the Russians for “help” in finding Hillary Clinton’s missing emails as “evidence” that the President was colluding with Russians! That video of a joke conveyed before Donald Trump was even elected president is somehow supposed to be more evidence of his evil intent and therefore supports his impeachment three years later? Will these fools never give up?

And then the Democrats allow their majority counsel witness Barry Berke (who led off the day’s testimony) to directly question the minority counsel witness Stephen Castor! A witness questioning a witness. Completely unprecedented and unethical!

While there were other revelations, one that stuck in my mind was majority counsel Daniel Goldman’s refusal to answer ranking member Doug Collins’ (R-GA) question about who made the decision to match the telephone numbers on the subpoenaed phone records to Devin Nunes, John Solomon, and others. I remind you that phone records obtained via lawful subpoenas are not to be used for partisan political purposes, and the Democrats are trying to get away with that yet again.

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There was a lot of fodder during that hearing that will be spun falsely by Democrat operatives in the legacy media. It’s what those people are paid to on behalf of the Democrat Party. I will describe one of their methodologies frequently used to present a veneer of objectivity in doing so after touching on the DoJ IG’s FISA abuse report.

That report was released in the afternoon while the House Judiciary impeachment farce was ongoing. It’s no surprise that the Democrats scheduled their hearing on the same day that report was released because there is a LOT of information in there that destroys the 3-year-old Democrat narrative about the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign.

Horowitz did not refer anyone for prosecution for their actions in withholding exculpatory evidence and in submitted false applications for FISA warrants in 2016. This will be furiously spun by Democrats as “full exoneration” while other facts are willfully ignored, for example:

  • FBI Counterintelligence Division (CD) Assistant Director (AD) Bill Priestap made an unprecedented unilateral decision NOT to provide candidate Trump with a defensive briefing when the FBI started investigating his campaign staff.

  • Exculpatory evidence was not included in FISA warrant applications:

  • Although used to obtain the first FISA warrant on Carter Page, the Steele dossier did NOT contain information corroborating the claims made in the warrant application:

  • The IG said that the FBI used an August 2016 defensive briefing as an opportunity to collect derogatory information on LTG Flynn:
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There of course is a TON more in the report that exposes the corruption of, and illegal actions by, DoJ and FBI personnel in obtaining FISA warrants on Trump campaign personnel. It is already being spun by Democrats and sympathetic operatives in the legacy media. Beware!

Here is an example of how the legacy media attempt to legitimize their spinning, as demonstrated during the panel discussion on Meet the Press this past Sunday. NBC panels invariably are a stacked deck against Republicans and President Trump. In Sunday’s example, the panel consisted of former Republican congressman Carl Curbelo (R-FL), former Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter, NBC News White House correspondent Kristen Welker, and national White House correspondent for the Washington Post Robert Costa (who had Stefan Halper for a professor at Cambridge!). And there you have it: two “reporters” from WaPo and NBC News who are partisan hacks; an Obama/Democrat political operative; and a Republican who is not in office anymore. Plus Chuck Todd who worked on leftwing Sen. Tom Harkin’s campaign in 1992. And this is what NBC News claims is impartial and balanced reporting!

[Note: I’ve been observing this same legacy media strategy in play since the early 1980s. Three Democrat hacks plus an NBC moderator who is a former Democrat political operative versus one minor Republican who is out of government so that NBC can claim that their reporting is “balanced.” What a crock!]

Here are just a few snippets to give you an idea of how the news is spun in a stacked deck such as this.

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  • Welker said that she spoke to sources over the weekend that said the Senate wants to have this all wrapped up in two weeks. She further claimed to have talked to some Democrats who said that Nancy Pelosi should “hold the articles of impeachment … until the witnesses come and testify.”

[Me: somewhat innocuous, but then her sources are largely Uniparty since NBC News has been furthering the Democrat narrative on overdrive since President Trump was inaugurated.]

  • Costa: He stated that there will likely be a Senate trial. “What are the 2020 Republicans up for reelection going to do? They’re going to pressure Majority Leader McConnell about the rules in how this plays out.”

[Me: easy answer! The Republicans are going to vote to acquit because they don’t want to commit political seppuku. Costa repeats the same Democrat narrative in the Kavanaugh hearings that Republicans were going to peel off and not vote to confirm the judge. Typical spinning.]

  • Todd put up a graphic showing 4,235 GOP-affiliated ads versus on Democrat-affiliated ads on impeachment over the last week and then remarked gratuitously that Democrats don’t want to look like they’re politicizing this impeachment process.

[Me: LMAO! The DNC is in debt. You know damn well they’d have flooded the airwaves with ads if they had the money.]

  • Cutter responded by saying that the split in the country pre-dated those ads. She further stated that polls show there are more Americans who favor looking into impeachment than don’t, as well as a majority who believe President Trump should be removed from office. She claimed that Democrat ads are being run on “bread and butter issues,” not impeachment.
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[Me: yeah, right! All of that is spinning. Those polls predated the impeachment hearings, and the polls since the start of the Schiff show trial have been trending in the President’s favor. And the reason that Democrats aren’t running impeachment-related ads is because their own internal polls show that that is a losing proposition.]

  • Todd then made a big play that Democrat should be doing a massive media buy campaign to counter the Republican ads.

[Me: this is what Todd does – encourage Democrats to do things that he himself believes to be in their best interests. So much for his “impartiality.”]

  • Cutter responded by claiming that Pelosi and other Democrats consider this a “somber, serious moment” about impeaching a POTUS. She then claimed that there is ample evidence that President Trump actively solicited assistance foreign interference to secure his own election, and that “It wasn’t the first time that he did it.” She finished by saying that it’s going to be relatively easy to build the public case to convince Americans of the President’s guilt.

[Me: there’s that poll-tested answer again – a somber, serious moment. Obviously, she didn’t watch the two majority counsels at today’s show trial. And no, the President did NOT “actively solicit foreign assistance” no matter how many times you follow Goebbels’ advice about repeating lies until people believe them. Finally, if it was going to be “easy to build the public case” for impeachment, then the polls would be moving in that direction already. Another blatant lie from a Democrat hack.]

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  • Curbelo then said that Nancy Pelosi has one more chance to go off script (vote to impeach, acquit in the Senate, and maintain the existing partisan divisions in America). Or, she can hold off and let voters decide in November 2020. He suggests that the public needs to be trusted to make the right decision.

[Me: finally, a moderate Republican has a chance to weigh in. His point about letting the people decide in November 2020 is spot on. He knows Pelosi won’t allow that to happen without the Democrats impeaching the President.]

  • Cutter then talked about “new evidence coming out” (McGahn ruling, Bolton decision, Giuliani investigation, etc.) and expressed a concern about moving ahead too fast such that that testimony would not be available in a Senate trial.

[Me: the usual Democrat spin that the NEXT evidence will convict the President. She knows the Democrats have nothing, but what she ignores is the likely testimony of witnesses that will destroy the Democrats’ impeachment narrative: Ciaramella, Schiff, Schiff’s staffers, Hunter Biden, Chalupa, etc.]

  • Costa claimed that Giuliani is sending signals that the President is going to conduct “political war” making his own case on Ukraine and corruption. He wrote a story in the WaPo that Republicans are embracing the notion that Ukraine meddled in 2016 “despite testimony from US officials that counters that thinking. “You nailed it, Chuck. They’re conflating op-ed articles with political interference.”
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[Me: Costa is apparently miffed that the Democrat isn’t just turning the other cheek and taking his impeachment medicine. And pushing the Democrat narrative that Ukrainian meddling didn’t happen is complete B.S. If Ukrainians writing op-eds in US periodicals during a US election campaign isn’t meddling, then what the hell is?]

There was a lot more, but the spinning by three of the four panel members plus the moderator is easy to discern. This is how the legacy media operates, and this has been ongoing for decades, anesthetizing Americans with Democrat agit-prop rather than informing them. Sadly, we’re going to see a lot more of it in the ensuing weeks, as spinning is all the Democrats have at this point.

The end.

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