By Aaron MATÉ
Five years after the Hillary Clinton campaign-funded collection of Trump-Russia conspiracy theories known as the Steele dossier was published by BuzzFeed, news outlets that amplified its false allegations have suffered major losses of credibility. The recent indictment of the dossier’s main source, Igor Danchenko, for allegedly lying to the FBI, has catalyzed a new reckoning.
In response to what the news site Axios has called “one of the most egregious journalistic errors in modern history,” the Washington Post has re-edited at least a dozen stories related to Steele. For two of those, the Post removed entire sections, changed headlines, and added lengthy editor’s notes.
Rosalind Helderman: Bylined reporter on two of the Post’s most corrected stories. Twitter/@PostRoz
But the Post’s response also exhibits the limits of the media’s Steele-induced self-examination. First, the reporters bylined on those two articles, Rosalind S.
But the Post’s response also exhibits the limits of the media’s Steele-induced self-examination. First, the reporters bylined on those two articles, Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger, and their editors have declined to explain how and why they were so egregiously misled. Nor have they revealed the names of the anonymous sources responsible for deceiving them and the public over months and years.
Perhaps more important, the Post, like other publications, has so far limited its Russiagate reckoning to work directly involving Steele – and only after a federal indictment forced its hand. But the Steele dossier has been widely discredited since at least April 2019, when Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller and his team of prosecutors and FBI agents were unable to find evidence in support of any of its claims.
The dossier was also only one aspect of the Trump-Russia misinformation fed to the public. Even when not advancing Steele’s most lurid allegations, the nation’s most prominent news outlets nonetheless furthered his underlying narrative of a Trump-Russia conspiracy and a Kremlin-compromised White House.
Along the way, some journalists won their profession’s highest distinction for this flawed coverage. While co-bylining stories that the Post has all but retracted, Helderman and Hamburger also share a now increasingly awkward honor along with more than a dozen other colleagues at the Post and New York Times: a Pulitzer Prize. In 2018, the Pulitzer awards committee honored the two papers for 20 articles it described as “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.”
Above, Washingon Post and New York Times reporters whose 2018 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting on the Trump-Russia affair is tainted by evidence in the public record that significant reporting was erroneous or misleading — reporting that still has not been corrected by their publications, even though the Post recently made numerous corrections regarding the long-discredited Steele dossier. Journalist identifications are here. (Credit: YouTube/The Pulitzer Prizes)
Although neither newspaper has given any indication that it is returning the Pulitzer, the public record has long made clear that many of those stories – most of which had nothing to do with Steele – include falsehoods and distortions requiring significant corrections. Far from showing “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage,” the Post’s and the Times’ reporting has the same problem as the Steele document that these same outlets are now distancing themselves from: a reliance on anonymous, deceptive, and almost certainly partisan sources for claims that proved to be false.
Many other prestigious outlets published a barrage of similarly flawed articles. These include the report by Peter Stone and Greg Gordon of McClatchy that the Mueller team obtained evidence that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen had visited Prague in 2016; Jane Mayer’s fawning March 2018 profile of Steele in the New Yorker; the report by Jason Leopold and Anthony Cormier of BuzzFeed that President Trump instructed Cohen to lie to Congress — explicitly denied by Mueller at the time; and Luke Harding of The Guardian’s bizarre and evidence-free allegation that Julian Assange and Paul Manafort met in London’s Ecuadorian embassy.
McClatchy and BuzzFeed have added editors’ notes to their stories but have not retracted them.
In this article, RealClearInvestigations has collected five instances of stories containing false or misleading claims, and thereby due for retraction or correction, that were either among the Post and Times’ Pulitzer-winning entries, or other work of reporters who shared that prize. Significantly, this analysis is not based on newly discovered information, but documents and other material long in the public domain. Remarkably, some of the material that should spark corrections has instead been held up by the Post and Times as vindication of their work.
RCI sent detailed queries about these stories to the Post, the Times, and the journalists involved. The Post’s response has been incorporated into the relevant portion of this article. The Times did not respond to RCI’s queries by the time of publication.
Falsehood No. 1: Michael Flynn Discussed Sanctions With Russia and Lied About It
Flynn faces the press in his only White House Briefing Room remarks as national security adviser. YouTube/C-SPAN
Officials say Flynn discussed sanctions
By Greg Miller, Adam Entous and Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post, February 9, 2017
Less than a month after BuzzFeed published the Steele dossier, the Washington Post significantly advanced the then-growing narrative that the Trump White House was beholden to Russia.
A Feb. 9, 2017, Post article claimed that National Security Adviser Michael Flynn “privately discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia” with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak “during the month before President Trump took office, contrary to public assertions by Trump officials.” The Post sourced its reporting to nine “current and former officials” who occupied “senior positions at multiple agencies at the time of the calls” between Flynn and Kislyak following the Nov. 8, 2016 election.
The Post’s sources – who were revealing classified information, presumably from taps on Kislyak’s phone – left no room for doubt: “All of those officials said Flynn’s references to the election-related sanctions were explicit.” They also added their own spin to the meaning of the conversations: Flynn’s calls with Kislyak “were interpreted by some senior U.S. officials as an inappropriate and potentially illegal signal to the Kremlin that it could expect a reprieve from sanctions that were being imposed by the Obama administration in late December to punish Russia for its alleged interference in the 2016 election.”
Adding some mind-reading to the narrative, a former official told the Post that Kislyak “was left with the impression that the sanctions would be revisited at a later time.”
The Post and its sources fueled innuendo that Flynn had floated a payback for Russia’s alleged 2016 election help and lied to cover it up.
Facing a barrage of anonymous officials contradicting him, Flynn walked back an initial denial and told the Post that “while he had no recollection of discussing sanctions, he couldn’t be certain that the topic never came up.” Four days later, he was forced to resign. The following December, Special Counsel Mueller seemingly vindicated the Post’s narrative when Flynn pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI, including about his discussion of sanctions with the Russian ambassador.
Flynn would later backtrack and reverse that guilty plea, sparking a multi-year legal saga. When the transcripts of his calls with Kislyak were finally released in May 2020, they showed that Flynn had grounds to fight: It wasn’t Flynn who made a false statement about discussing sanctions with Kislyak; it was all nine of the Post’s sources — and, later, the Mueller team — who had misled the public.
Sergei Kislyak: Transcripts of Flynn’s calls with the Russian Ambassador do not square with the Washington Post’s reporting. AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File
In all of Flynn’s multiple conversations with Kislyak in December 2016 and January 2017, the issue of sanctions only gets one fleeting mention – by Kislyak. The Russian ambassador tells Flynn that he is concerned that sanctions will hurt U.S.-Russia cooperation on fighting jihadist insurgents in Syria. The sum total of Flynn’s response on the matter: “Yeah, yeah.”
The pair did have a longer discussion about a separate action Obama had ordered at the time: the expulsion of 35 Russian officials living in the United States. The expulsions, which were carried out by the State Department, were a distinct action from the sanctions, which targeted nine Russian entities and individuals under a presidential executive order.
In discussing the expulsions, Flynn never addressed what Trump might do; his only request was that the Kremlin’s response be “reciprocal” and “even-keeled” so that “cool heads” can “prevail.”
“[D]on’t go any further than you have to,” Flynn told Kislyak. “Because I don’t want us to get into something that has to escalate, on a, you know, on a tit for tat.”
In its rendering of the call, the Mueller team cited these comments from Flynn – but inaccurately claimed that he had made them about sanctions. The Special Counsel’s Office appeared to be following the lead of the Post’s sources, who had claimed, falsely, that Flynn’s references to sanctions were “explicit.” Both the Post and the special counsel used Flynn’s explicit comments about expulsions to erroneously assert that he had discussed sanctions.
Yet the release of the transcripts did not prompt the Post to come clean. Instead, both the Post and the New York Times doubled down on the deception. The Post’s May 29, 2020, story about the transcripts’ release was headlined “Transcripts of calls between Flynn, Russian diplomat show they discussed sanctions.” The Times claimed that same day that “Flynn Discussed Sanctions at Length With Russian Diplomat, Transcripts Show.”
In reality, the transcripts showed the exact opposite.
In response to RCI, the Post acknowledged that the Feb. 9, 2017 story had conflated “sanctions” with “expulsions.”
“We appropriately used the word ‘sanctions’ in reference to the punitive measures announced by President Obama, including Treasury penalties on Russian individuals, expulsions of Russian diplomats/spies and the seizure of two Russia-owned properties,” Shani George, the Post’s Vice President for Communications, wrote.
In other articles, however — including a Dec. 29, 2016 article linked in the Feb. 9 story’s second paragraph – the Post made a clear distinction between the two. Asked about dropping the distinction between sanctions and expulsions for the article discussed here, the Post did not respond by the time of publication.
Falsehood No. 2: Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence
Trump Campaign Aides Had
Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence
By Michael S. Schmidt, Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo
New York Times, February 14, 2017
On Feb. 14, 2017 – just one day after Flynn resigned – the New York Times fanned the flames of the growing Trump-Russia inferno.
“Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials,” the Times reported.
The story, written by three members of the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning team, Michael S. Schmidt, Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo, also suggested that these suspicious “repeated contacts” were the basis for the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s potential conspiracy with Russia: “American law enforcement and intelligence agencies intercepted the communications around the same time they were discovering evidence that Russia was trying to disrupt the presidential election by hacking into the Democratic National Committee, three of the officials said. The intelligence agencies then sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election.”
The article even threw in a plug for Christopher Steele, who, the Times said, is believed by senior FBI officials to have “a credible track record.”
The story helped build momentum for the appointment of Special Counsel Mueller, and then quickly unraveled.
Four months after the Times’ report – and just weeks after Mueller’s hiring – FBI Director James Comey testified to Congress about the story, saying that “in the main, it was not true.” When the Mueller report was released in April 2019, it contained no evidence of any contacts between Trump associates and Russian intelligence officials, senior or otherwise. And in July 2020, declassified documents showed that Peter Strzok, the top FBI counterintelligence agent who opened the Trump-Russia probe, had privately dismissed the article. The Times reporting, Strzok wrote upon its publication, was “misleading and inaccurate … we are unaware of ANY Trump advisers engaging in conversations with Russian intelligence officials.”
Comey on Times story: “In the main, it was not true.” It’s still uncorrected.
To date, the Times has appended two minor corrections. The most recent one reads: “An earlier version of a photo caption with this article gave an incorrect middle initial for Paul Manafort. It is J., not D.”
Rather than address its glaring errors, the Times left the story otherwise intact. When the Strzok notes disputing its claims emerged, the Times responded: “We stand by our reporting.”
Earlier this year, the Times even claimed vindication. The occasion was an April 15, 2021, press release from the Treasury Department. The Treasury statement alleged that Konstantin Kilimnik, a former aide to Trump’s one-time campaign manager, Paul Manafort, is a “known Russian Intelligence Services agent” who “provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy” during the 2016 election.
Writing that same day, Times reporters Mark Mazzetti and Michael S. Schmidt declared that Treasury’s evidence-free press release — coupled with an evidence-free Senate Intelligence claim in August 2020 that Kilimnik is a “Russian intelligence officer” — now “confirm” the Times’ report from February 2017.
The Treasury announcement did not explain how the department, which conducted no official Russiagate investigation, was prompted to lodge an explosive allegation that a multi-year FBI/Mueller investigation found no evidence for. It also does not name the position Kilimnik allegedly held in Russian intelligence – much less say whether he was a senior official. It also failed to address ample countervailing evidence:
- that Kilimnik had shared this same, publicly available polling data with Americans;
- that the FBI still does not deem him a Russian intelligence officer, instead claiming that he has unspecified “ties”;
- that he had long been a valued State Department source;
- that he traveled to the U.S. on a civilian Russian passport, not the suspicious diplomatic one Mueller alleged without producing it;
- and that even the Senate Intelligence Committee was “unable to obtain direct evidence of what Kilimnik did with the polling data and whether that data was shared further.”
Wanted in U.S., Kilimnik shared his “R” (regular) U.S. visa and Russian civilian passport with RCI. Konstantin Kilimnik via RealClearInvestigations
In addition, no U.S. government or congressional investigator ever contacted him for questioning, Kilimnik told RCI in an April 2021 interview when he produced images of the civilian passport.
To declare victory, Mazzetti and Schmidt not only relied on one sentence of a press release but distorted the claims of their original story. Even if Kilimnik somehow proved to be a Russian intelligence officer, the Times’ 2017 story had reported that the Trump campaign had engaged in “intercepted calls” with multiple “senior Russian intelligence officials” – not just one person, and at a “senior” level.
To elide that, Mazzetti and Schmidt abandoned the plural Russian “intelligence officials” to spin the Treasury press release as proof that “there had been numerous interactions between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence during the year before the election.” It then returned to the use of the plural to further claim that Treasury’s statement is “the strongest evidence to date that Russian spies had penetrated the inner workings of the Trump campaign.”
RCI sent Mazzetti and Schmidt detailed questions about their February 2017 article and their claim, four years later, that a Senate report and a Treasury press release confirm it. They did not respond.
Falsehood No. 3: George Papadopoulos’s ‘Night of Heavy Drinking’ With the Australian Envoy
The Times mischaracterized George Papadopoulos’s supposed Russiagate-launching barroom chat. AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin
Unlikely Source Propelled Russian Meddling Inquiry
By Sharon LaFraniere, Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo
New York Times, December 30, 2017
By late 2017, the Russiagate saga was engulfing the Trump presidency. The indictments of several figures connected to Trump fueled a media-driven narrative that Mueller was closing in on a Trump-Russia conspiracy.
But a roadblock emerged in late October. After a year of evasions, the Hillary Clinton campaign and its law firm Perkins Coie admitted that they had funded the Steele dossier and that a lawyer for the firm, Marc Elias, had commissioned it. The disclosure was forced by House Republicans, led by Rep. Devin Nunes, who had subpoenaed the bank records of Fusion GPS in a bid to identify its secret funder. (Fusion GPS was the opposition-research firm hired by Perkins Coie that in turn hired Steele.)
For those wedded to the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, the admission was problematic: After months of anonymous media claims that Steele’s dossier was “credible” and even “bearing out,” the heralded document was exposed as a paid partisan hit job from Trump’s political opponents. If the FBI was found to have relied on the dossier, the Clinton campaign’s key role could discredit the entire investigation.
Just before the 2017 year-end deadline for 2018 Pulitzer eligibility, the New York Times produced a new origin story for the probe that would temper these concerns and help the newspaper win the prize. The FBI’s decision to open the Trump-Russia probe had nothing to do with Steele, the Times claimed. Instead, the instigator was George Papadopoulos, a low-level campaign volunteer indicted by Mueller two months prior.
“During a night of heavy drinking at an upscale London bar in May 2016,” the Times’ piece began, Papadopoulos told an Australian diplomat named Alexander Downer that Russia had “political dirt on Hillary Clinton,” including “thousands of emails.” Papadopoulos, the Times said, had learned of the Russian scheme the previous month from Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese academic who claimed to be in touch with “high-level Russian officials.” Mifsud’s claim signaled inside knowledge of Russia’s alleged hack of the Democratic National Committee, the Times said, because at that point the “information was not yet public.”
Alexander Downer: The Australian diplomat’s account of his conversation with George Papadopoulos conflicts with the Times’ reporting. Twitter/@AlexanderDowner
When Downer, via the Australian government, relayed this information to the U.S. in July, the FBI decided to open its Trump-Russia probe, codenamed Crossfire Hurricane, the Times reported.
“The [DNC] hacking and the revelation that a member of the Trump campaign may have had inside information about it were driving factors that led the F.B.I. to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia’s attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump’s associates conspired,” the Times claimed. The article pointedly asserted that the Steele dossier “was not part of the justification to start a counterintelligence inquiry, American officials said.” (In a possible contradiction, it also claims, without specifics, “that the investigation was also propelled by intelligence from other friendly governments, including the British.”)
Several key aspects of the article have been challenged by the principals involved — leaving aside a key question the Times appears never to have asked: Why would the FBI launch a counterintelligence probe of a presidential campaign based on a barroom conversation involving a volunteer?
Moreover, the Times or its sources mischaracterized the barroom conversation, according to both of its participants. Speaking to a Sydney-based newspaper a few months later about the fateful London exchange, Downer said Papadopoulos had never mentioned “dirt” or “thousands of emails” — which the FBI would have linked to the DNC hack. Instead, Downer told The Australian, Papadopoulos “mentioned the Russians might use material that they have on Hillary Clinton in the lead-up to the election, which may be damaging.” Contrary to the specificity of the Times’ rendering, Downer recalled that Papadopoulos “didn’t say what it was.” He also said Papadopoulos made no mention of Mifsud, a mysterious figure with rumored ties to Western intelligence who vanished after a cursory FBI interview.
A declassified FBI document would later confirm Downer’s account of a vague conversation. In May 2020, the Justice Department released the July 31, 2016, FBI electronic communication (EC) that officially opened its Russia investigation. The EC states that Downer had told the U.S. government that Papadopoulos had “suggested the Trump team had received some kind of suggestion from Russia that it could assist” the Trump campaign by anonymously releasing damaging information about Clinton and President Obama. The EC made no mention of any “dirt,” “thousands of emails,” or Mifsud. It also acknowledged that the nature of the “suggestion” was “unclear” and that the possible Russian help could entail “material acquired publicly,” as opposed to hacked emails by the thousands.
Another declassified document, the December 2017 testimony from Andrew McCabe — the former FBI deputy director who helped launch and oversee the Russia probe — also undermined the Times’ premise. Asked why the FBI never sought a surveillance warrant on the Trump volunteer who supposedly sparked the investigation, McCabe replied that “Papadopoulos’ comment didn’t particularly indicate that he was the person … that was interacting with the Russians.”
Despite the countervailing claims of Downer, McCabe, and the FBI document that opened the investigation (not to mention the recollections of both Papadopoulos and Downer that they only had one drink, belying the Times claim of “a night of heavy drinking”), the Times has never run a single update or correction.
Falsehood No. 4: Russia Launched a Sweeping Interference Campaign That Posed a ‘National Security Threat’
Social media posts from Russia’s effort to “assault American democracy,” as the Times put it. HPSCI Minority
Doubting the intelligence, Trump pursues Putin
and leaves a Russian threat unchecked
By Greg Miller, Greg Jaffe and Philip Rucker
Washington Post, December 14, 2017
To Sway Vote, Russia Used Army of Fake Americans
By Scott Shane
New York Times, September 8, 2017
As the Pulitzer-winning media outlets relied on anonymous intelligence officials to fuel innuendo about Trump-Russia collusion, they turned to these same sources to imply that a compromised president was unwilling to confront the existential threat of “Russian interference.”
“Nearly a year into his presidency,” a Pulitzer-winning December 2017 Washington Post story declared, “Trump continues to reject the evidence that Russia waged an assault on a pillar of American democracy and supported his run for the White House.” As a result, Trump has “impaired the government’s response to a national security threat.”
The Post’s article was sourced to “more than 50 current and former U.S. officials” including former CIA Director Michael Hayden, who “described the Russian interference as the political equivalent of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.”
Another Pulitzer-winning story, written by Scott Shane of the New York Times two months earlier, offered a revealing window into the merits of the Russian interference allegations, and the appropriateness of equating them to attacks like 9/11.
“To Sway Vote, Russia Used Army of Fake Americans,” the Times’ headline blared. Aside from the Pulitzer board, Shane’s article also impressed the New York Times’ editors, who proclaimed in a follow-up editorial that their colleague’s “startling investigation” had revealed “further evidence of what amounted to unprecedented foreign invasion of American democracy.”
But from the details in Shane’s article, it is difficult to see why anonymous U.S. intelligence officials, Pulitzer judges, and Times editors saw the alleged Russian “cyberarmy” as such a seismic danger.
Melvin Redick, suspected Russian operator. The proof? Articles “reflecting a pro-Russian worldview,” the Times reported. New York Times
Shane’s piece opened by describing a June 2016 Facebook post by an account user named Melvin Redick, who promoted the website DC Leaks, alleged by the U.S. to be a Russian intelligence cutout. Redick’s posts, Shane writes, were “among the first public signs” of Russia’s “cyberarmy of counterfeit Facebook and Twitter accounts” that turned the platforms into “engines of deception and propaganda.” To Clint Watts, a former FBI agent turned MSNBC commentator, Russia’s infiltration of Facebook and Twitter was so dangerous that social media, he said, is now afflicted by a “bot cancer.”
But these explosive conclusions, Shane’s own piece later acknowledged, were undermined by a lack of evidence. The online users who manipulated social media, Shane quietly notes near the bottom, were in fact only “suspected Russian operators” (emphasis added). Shane’s uncertainty extends to Melvin Redick, the alleged Russian bot who begins the story. Redick is one of several identified accounts that “appeared to be Russian creations,” Shane concedes. The only proof tying Redick to Russia? “His posts were never personal, just news articles reflecting a pro-Russian worldview.”
Robert Mueller’s final report two years later also tried to raise alarm about what he called a “sweeping and systematic” Russian interference campaign. But as with the Pulitzer-winning outlets before him, the contents of his report failed to support the headline assertion. The Russian troll farm blamed for a sweeping social media campaign to install Trump spent about $46,000 on pre-election posts that were juvenile, barely about the election, and mostly appeared during the primaries. After suggesting that the troll farm was tied to the Kremlin, the Mueller team was forced to walk back that innuendo in court, and later dropped the case altogether. The other main claim regarding Russian interference – that the GRU (Russia’s foreign intelligence agency) hacked the DNC’s email servers and gave the material to Wikileaks – was quietly undermined by Mueller’s qualified language and key evidentiary gaps, as RCI reported in 2019.
The Russian hacking claim suffered an additional setback in May 2020, when testimony from the CEO of CrowdStrike — the Clinton-contracted firm that was the first to publicly accuse Russia of infiltrating the DNC — was declassified. Speaking to the House Intelligence Committee in December 2017, CrowdStrike’s Shawn Henry disclosed that his company “did not have concrete evidence” that alleged Russian hackers had stolen any data from the servers.
Despite its once exhaustive and alarmist interest in the operations of Russia’s cyber army, neither the Times nor the Post has ever reported Henry’s explosive admission. This includes Pulitzer-winning Post national security reporter Ellen Nakashima, who effectively kicked off the Russiagate saga by breaking the news on CrowdStrike’s Russian hacking allegation in June 2016. Other than Henry, Nakashima’s main source was Michael Sussmann – the Clinton campaign attorney recently indicted for lying to the FBI.
Falsehood No. 5: The Justice Department Pulled Its Punches on Trump
Justice Dept. Never Fully Examined
Trump’s Ties to Russia, Ex-Officials Say
By Michael S. Schmidt
New York Times, Aug. 30, 2020 (Updated June 9, 2021)
When Mueller ended his investigation in 2019 without charging Trump or any other associate for conspiring with Russia, a collusion-obsessed media formulated more conspiracy theories to explain away this unwelcome ending.
First came the belief that Attorney General William Barr had forced Mueller to shut down, misrepresented his final report, and hid the smoking-gun evidence behind redactions. When Mueller failed to support any of these allegations in his July 2019 congressional testimony, a new culprit was needed.
Michael S. Schmidt of the New York Times: Shared two Pulitzer prizes in 2018. Andrew Lih/Wikimedia
One year later, the New York Times found its fall guy: Mueller’s overseer, former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, had handcuffed the special counsel.
“The Justice Department secretly took steps in 2017 to narrow the investigation into Russian election interference and any links to the Trump campaign, according to former law enforcement officials, keeping investigators from completing an examination of President Trump’s decades-long personal and business ties to Russia,” Michael Schmidt reported on Aug. 30, 2020. Rosenstein, Schmidt said, “curtailed the investigation without telling the bureau, all but ensuring it would go nowhere” and preventing the FBI from “completing an inquiry into whether the president’s personal and financial links to Russia posed a national security threat.”
To buttress his case, Schmidt cited the Democrats’ leading collusion advocate, Rep. Adam Schiff, who feared that “that the F.B.I. Counterintelligence Division has not investigated counterintelligence risks arising from President Trump’s foreign financial ties.”
But as Schmidt’s article tacitly acknowledged, that outcome did not come from Rosenstein but the Mueller team itself. After Rosenstein appointed Mueller, Schmidt reported, members of the special counsel’s team “held early discussions led by the agent Peter Strzok about a counterintelligence investigation of the president.” But these “efforts fizzled,” Schmidt added, when Strzok “was removed from the inquiry three months later for sending text messages disparaging Mr. Trump.” If Rosenstein had indeed “curtailed” a counterintelligence investigation by Mueller’s team, why did the special counsel staffers discuss it, and why did it only “fizzle” upon Strzok’s exit three months later?
Strzok himself disputed the premise of Schmidt’s article.
“I didn’t feel such a limitation,” Strzok told the Atlantic. “When I discussed this with Mueller and others, it was agreed that FBI personnel attached to the Special Counsel’s Office would do the counterintelligence work, which necessarily included the president.” The only problem, Strzok added, was that by “the time I left the team, we hadn’t solved this problem of who and how to conduct all of the counterintelligence work.” Strzok’s “worry,” he added, was that the counterintelligence angle “wasn’t ever effectively done” – not that it was ever curtailed. Another key Mueller team member, lead prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, also rejected Schmidt’s claim.
NYT story today is wrong re alleged secret DOJ order prohibiting a counterintelligence investigation by Mueller, “without telling the bureau.” Dozens of FBI agents/analysts were embedded in Special Counsel’s Office and we were never told to keep anything from them. 1 of 2
— Andrew Weissmann (@AWeissmann_) August 31, 2020
Also erroneous is NYT claim “Rosenstein concluded the F.B.I. lacked sufficient reason to conduct an investigation into the president’s links to a foreign adversary.” See DOJ Special Counsel Appointment Order, para. (b)(i). 2 of 2
— Andrew Weissmann (@AWeissmann_) August 31, 2020
Rosenstein’s May 2017 scope memo, which established the parameters of Mueller’s investigation, indeed contained no such limitations. It broadly tasked Mueller to examine “any links and/or co-ordination” between the Russian government and anyone associated with the Trump campaign, as well as – even more expansively – “any matters that arose or may arise directly from that investigation.”
In his July 2019 congressional appearance, Mueller had multiple opportunities to reveal that his probe had been impeded or narrowed. Asked by Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.) whether “at any time in the investigation, your investigation was curtailed or stopped or hindered,” Mueller replied “No.” When Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) tried to lead Mueller into agreeing that he “of course … did not obtain the president’s tax returns, which could otherwise show foreign financial sources,” Mueller did not oblige. “I’m not going to speak to that,” Mueller replied.
With no curtailing or interference in the probe, perhaps Mueller never turned up any Russia-tied counterintelligence or financial concerns about Trump because there was simply none to find.
For a media establishment that had spent years promoting a Trump-Russia collusion narrative and sidelining countervailing facts, that was indeed a tough outcome to fathom.
But it’s no time for excuses or false claims of vindication: The tepid accounting spurred by the Steele dossier’s collapse should be just the start of a far more exhaustive reckoning. Broadly misleading journalism that plunged an American presidency into turmoil demands much more than piecemeal corrections.
