Wrap Up Smear 101
Clinton also shared a statement from her then-foreign policy advisor, Jake Sullivan. This "secret hotline", Sullivan claimed, "could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow" and "may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump’s ties to Russia." To Sullivan, "it certainly seems the Trump Organization felt it had something to hide."
• But five year later, now we have confirmation that it was in fact the Clinton campaign that was hiding its role as the source of this story. As Glenn Greenwald notes:
• Both Hillary and Jake Sullivan were pretending that they had just learned about this shocking story from Slate when, in fact, it was Hillary's own lawyers and researchers who had spent weeks pushing the story to both the FBI and friendly journalists like Foer. In other words, it was Hillary and her team who had manufactured the hoax, then pretended that — like everyone else — they were just learning about it, and believing it to be true, because a media outlet to which they had fed the false story had just published it.
• Indeed, the Clinton campaign's role in planting the Alfa Bank story was so extensive that it appears to have influenced the day it came to light. As Durham recounts, on October 30th, a Fusion GPS employee wrote to Slate's Foer and told him "time to hurry." Foer responded by sharing what he called "the first 2500 words" of his article, and then published it the following day. He never disclosed that the story had come to him from Trump’s Democratic rival.
“What more evidence do you need?”
Comparing the indictment's details to the way Foer and other credulous journalists spun the Clinton-fueled Alfa Bank "narrative" offers an instructive window into how the media enabled the scam. Whereas Durham reveals that the Alfa Bank team was instructed to create a "narrative" about Trump-Russia ties that would please Democratic Party "VIPs", the Alfa "researchers" gave the Clinton campaign's media dupes an inverse cover story: they were simply well-meaning internet sleuths trying to protect Trump's campaign too.
• "We wanted to help defend both campaigns, because we wanted to preserve the integrity of the election," one of the unknown researchers told Foer. "We thought there was no way in the world the Russians would just attack the Democrats," but the Republicans as well, another source told the New Yorker's Dexter Filkins. "We were trying to protect them."
• Filkins' story – published in October 2018, two years after Foer’s, and long after the FBI had privately concluded that there was nothing to it – gave the Alfa Bank story a new shelf life.
• Natasha Bertrand, now a correspondent for CNN, joined Foer on MSNBC in October 2018 to declare that the Alfa Bank-Trump connection was in fact a collusion smoking gun. "What more evidence do you need? It's very, very obvious," Bertrand said.
• September 16th 2021
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That same night, Filkins was given an effusive reception from cable news' leading Trump-Russia conspiracy theorist. "We are blessed as a country to have journalists as talented as you and Franklin Foer writing about this," Rachel Maddow told Filkins from across the anchor desk.
• -@maddow in 2018 to Dexter Filkins on his and Foer's stories about secret Trump-Russian bank contacts – a DNC-funded scam that is now subject to a federal indictment.
September 17th 2021
210 Retweets741 Likes
•Predictably, the same media voices who parroted the Alfa Bank story and countless other Russia fantasies throughout the Trump era have now fallen silent or continued obfuscating.
• One day before Sussmann's indictment, Maddow covered the story based on a leak to the New York Times from someone in the Sussmann's camp. This allowed Maddow to avoid the damning details revealed in the indictment the following day, and instead portray the as-yet-uncharged case as a trivial charge from a Special Prosecutor desperate to show results.
• Neither Foer and Filkins have publicly commented on the indictment. If his past record is any indication, Filkins is not one for contrition. In October 2020 – two years after his initial story and more than one year after the Mueller report found zero evidence to support the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory, including the Alfa Bank story – Filkins attempted a half-hearted defense.
• Filkins had discovered that Durham was eyeing the Alfa Bank researchers for possible criminal charges, and that Alfa Bank had itself filed associated lawsuits. To Filkins, this legal activity was "troubling", he wrote, because it "could aid the Kremlin." Filkins even threw in a plug for Steele, whose "information", he declared, "has been neither proved nor disproved." Filkins may have missed the main sections of a scathing Department of Justice report of December 2019, which blasted the FBI for relying on Steele's fabrications.
https://mate.substack.com/p/with-clinton-lawyer-charged-the-russiagate