Translating the NY Times ‘exclusive’ about U.S. intelligence and President Trump

by WorldTribune Staff, May 8, 2019

Some observers, including supporters of President Donald Trump, hailed The New York Times “exclusive” story on May 3 about the bureau sending a “cloaked investigator” to a London meeting with Trump aide George Papadopoulos in September of 2016.

In the aftermath of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, the facts, it seemed, “were forcing even the Gray Lady to abandon its notorious anti-Trump agenda,” New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin noted on May 4.

‘The former ‘paper of record’ is protecting those who did the duping and the spying.’ / Wikimedia Commons

“If only that were true,” Goodwin wrote.

“In reality, we’ll see pigs fly before we see the Times fully committed to getting to the bottom of what Trump calls ‘Spygate’. The paper is still defending the dirty tricks of Barack Obama’s White House and its own role in spreading the Russia, Russia, Russia hysteria. It’s a relationship neither side can quit.”

Goodwin continued: “Instead of proving the Times is coming to its senses, Friday’s article about the 2016 London meeting is better seen as spin designed to protect deep-state sources feeling the heat. Attorney General Bill Barr’s promise to investigate the investigators spooked them and they are using their favorite media handmaiden to fight back.”

The result, Goodwin wrote, “is a story that takes a ‘modified limited hangout’ approach, where fragments are presented as revelations while the full picture remains artfully hidden.”

The front-page Times story identifies the investigator sent by the FBI as Azra Turk, but, “nowhere do we learn what Turk’s real name is or whom she works for,” Goodwin notes. “The story repeatedly suggests she is an FBI agent, but the fact that it doesn’t say so directly probably means she isn’t. Indeed, one of the story’s three reporters, Adam Goldman, told CNN they called Turk a government investigator ‘for a reason, and I’m going to leave it at that.’ That’s not journalism. That’s being a deep-state errand boy.”

All sources in the article are, “naturally,” anonymous, “identified generally as ‘people familiar with the operation,’ ” Goodwin wrote. “My guess is they include Jim Comey, Andrew McCabe and other dirty cops worried they are in Barr’s crosshairs.”

Comey, McCabe, Brennan, etc. “thought their woman would win fair-and-square, and if she did not she would certainly win through their machinations,” Goodwin wrote. “She did not. They never considered the possibility that the man they did dirty would one day investigate them. That’s why they so brazenly committed their offenses against the republic.”

The Times first reported the FBI’s 2016 contact with Papadopoulos in May of 2018, when the paper, along with The Washington Post, simultaneously revealed the bureau sent an “informant” to talk to two Trump aides after the agency “received evidence that the pair had suspicious contacts linked to Russia.”

Goodwin noted that “The fact that both papers had the same story reflects that it, like Friday’s piece, was a defensive leak orchestrated by nervous insiders.”

As for the word “spying,” the Times, Goodwin noted, “won’t go there, even as Barr makes a point of using it. The hypocrisy is shameless.”

As for The New York Times, Goodwin concluded, “we shouldn’t expect to find the truth there, either. The former ‘paper of record’ is protecting those who did the duping and the spying.”


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