[continued from previous message]

Around the same time, three CNN journalists were forced to resign after mistakenly reporting that Congress was investigating a “Russian investment fund with ties to Trump officials.” The problem was that the reporters had relied on a single anonymous
source. What if these other stories, including the Cohen scoop, also only depended on a single source? If CNN employed consistent standards, they would run out of reporters before the year was out.

There are dozens of examples of these innocent mistakes popping up on mainstream political media outlets over the past couple of years. And they always—always—skew in the same direction.

While bad behavior from sources is expected, the lack of skepticism from self-styled unbiased journalists is another story. A critical observer might even theorize that Trump-era partisan newsroom culture has made journalists increasingly susceptible to
being deceived by sources that peddle convenient stories to fit preconceived notions.

Of course, none of us have to watch CNN or trust it. It can conduct itself in any way it pleases. (Although, as Mark Meadows noted today, many times selective leaks from the DOJ and FBI are repackaged into news stories then used
to justify the extension
and broadening of criminal investigations. That’s a problem, maybe an even bigger problem than Trump’s empty threats to the media—two institutions that have developed a destructive symbiotic relationship.) But you would think there would be a
modicum of self-reflection about the problems plaguing journalism. You would be
wrong.

“The conservative echo chamber created that environment,” Chuck Todd said, explaining this weekend on “Meet the Press” the public’s distrust of the media. “It has been a tactic and a tool of the Roger Ailes-created echo chamber … It’s not
based in much fact.”

Todd seems to be under the impression that conservative anger and distrust of the media sprouted up in a vacuum. In Todd’s conception, journalists were public servants dispassionately dispensing the facts to a reality-starved public before Fox News
came along and ruined everything.

Now, it’s one thing to deny the embedded bias of political media—the left-ideological framing, skewed focus, and prejudiced coverage that’s forced
conservatives to consume news through a filter for decades—and it’s another
to ignore a bias that�
��s transforming into unethical advocacy.

Suspicion of the media was restive among conservatives long before Trump and Fox News exploited it. There will always be those who distrust any news that fails to confirm their worldview. But Trump’s “fake news” hyperbole has currency with many
Americans because the political media too often lives up to their worst expectations.

[]


Russian oligarch, Justice Department and a clear case of collusion
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8/28/2018

By John Solomon
Opinion Contributor

In a 20-month search for evidence of collusion between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia, none that is compelling has emerged.

Former FBI Director James Comey told Congress he found none. The U.S. intelligence community has given a similar assessment, though it did prove convincingly that Moscow meddled in the 2016 election through cyber warfare. And, so far, special counsel
Robert Mueller has not offered any collusion evidence, though his work continues.

But, for the first time, I can say there is evidence of collusion between Russians and Americans — specifically, the sort that is at the heart of counterintelligence work.

Before we review that evidence, let’s define collusion. The Collins Dictionary says its original British meaning was “secret or illegal cooperation, especially between countries or organizations.” Using that definition, collusion can be secret but
good, if the outcome is well-intended. Or, it can be bad, if it is meant to defraud, deceive or create illegality.

Now for the evidence, as presented to me by several sources, American and foreign:

In September 2015, senior Department of Justice (DOJ) official Bruce Ohr and some FBI agents met in New York with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska to seek the Russian billionaire’s help on organized crime investigations. The meeting
was facilitated —
though not attended — by British intelligence operative Christopher Steele.

In 2012, Steele’s private firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, was hired as a subcontractor by a law firm working for Deripaska, who then headed Russia’s largest aluminum company. Steele’s firm was asked to do research to help the law firm defend a
lawsuit filed against Deripaska by a business rival.

By 2015, Steele’s work had left him friendly with one of Deripaska’s lawyers, according to my sources. And when Ohr, then the associate deputy attorney general and a longtime acquaintance of Steele, sought help getting to meet Deripaska, Steele
obliged.

Deripaska, who frequently has appeared alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin at high-profile meetings, never really dealt with Steele, but he followed
his lawyer’s recommendations and met with Ohr, my sources say.

By that time, Deripaska already had proven himself helpful to the FBI. As I’ve written previously, based on numerous U.S. sources, he cooperated with the bureau from 2009 to 2011 and spent more than $25 million of his own money on an FBI-supervised
operation to try to rescue retired FBI agent Robert Levinson, who was captured in Iran while working as a CIA contractor.

U.S. officials and Levinson’s family told me that Deripaska’s efforts came close to securing Levinson’s freedom before the State Department scuttled a deal. The former agent has never been heard from again.

The 2015 meeting between Ohr, the FBI and Deripaska is captured cryptically in some of Ohr’s handwritten notes, recently turned over to Congress.

People familiar with the meeting said U.S. officials posed some investigative theories about suspected Russian organized crime and cyber espionage activity, theories that Deripaska indicated he did not believe were accurate.

The sources stressed that the 2015 meeting had nothing to do with any allegation about Russian meddling in the upcoming 2016 election but, rather, was an “outreach” about other types of suspected activity overseas that concerned U.S. officials.

A year later, Deripaska would get another visit from his FBI friends in New York. But this time the questions were about possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Specifically, the agents told Deripaska they believed Trump’s former
campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was secretly coordinating the election with Moscow.

Steele had planted that theory with the FBI. By that time the former MI6 agent was working for the American opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which had been hired by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee to
find Russian dirt on Trump. Steele’s theories, of course, are contained in the so-called Steele dossier provided to the FBI.

Ohr had his own connection to Fusion, which was paying his wife, Nellie, to work on the anti-Trump research project, according to congressional testimony.

Deripaska once had a business relationship with Manafort, but it ended in lawsuits. Despite that acrimony, Deripaska told the agents in that September 2016 meeting that he thought the theory that Manafort was colluding with Russia
to help Trump win the
election was preposterous.

Deripaska — like the many foreign business figures to whom U.S. intelligence has turned for help over the decades — is not without controversy or need. The State Department tried to keep him from getting a U.S. visa between 2006 and 2009 because they
believed he had unspecified connections to criminal elements in Russia as he consolidated power in the aluminum industry. Deripaska has denied those allegations and claims FBI agents told him in 2009 that the State Department file blocking his entry to
the country was merely a pretext.

Whatever the case, it is irrefutable that after he began helping the FBI, Deripaska regained entry to the United States. And he visited numerous times between 2009 and 2017, visa entry records show.

We now know that, on multiple occasions during those visits, the DOJ and FBI secretly collaborated with Deripaska in the hope of getting help, first regarding Levinson, then on Ohr’s matters, and finally on the Manafort case. U.S. officials told me
they assumed Deripaska let Putin’s team know he was helping the U.S. government and that his motive for helping was to keep visiting America.

Today, Deripaska is banned anew from the United States, one of several Russians
sanctioned in April by the Trump administration as a way to punish Putin for 2016 election meddling. But he wants to be clear about a few things, according to a statement
provided by his team. First, he did collude with Americans in the form of voluntarily assisting and meeting with the FBI, the DOJ and people such as Ohr between 2009 and 2016.

He also wants Americans to know he did not cooperate or assist with Steele’s dossier, and he tried to dispel the FBI notion that Russia and the Trump campaign colluded during the 2016 election.

“The latest reckless media chatter proposes that I had some unspecified involvement in the so-called dossier. Like most of the absurd fantasies and smears that ricochet across the internet, it is utterly false. I had absolutely
nothing to do with this
project, and I never had any knowledge of it until it was reported in the media
and I certainly wasn’t involved in any activity related to it,” Deripaska said in the statement his team provided me.

Americans can form their own conclusions about the veracity of those claims. But they now have a pretty convincing case of collusion between U.S. officials and Russians, one that isn’t necessarily all that harmful to the American interest.

And the tale of Ohr, Steele, Deripaska, the FBI and the DOJ is a cogent reminder that people looking for black-and-white answers on Russia are more likely to find lots of gray — the favorite color of the murky counterintelligence world.

John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work over the years has exposed U.S. and FBI intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists’ misuse of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous
cases of political corruption. He is The Hill’s executive vice president for video.

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