On Tuesday, The New York Times fired a shot heard round the world when it claimed President Donald Trump had asked former FBI Director James Comey “to shut down the federal investigation” into former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s contacts with the Russian and Turkish governments.
According to the writer of the story, Michael Schmidt, the exchange was all written down in a memo by Comey after a meeting with Trump.
I mean, allegedly. And the memo was read off to him over the phone. Oh, wait, no — not quite read off. His source saw it and vouchsafed for its authenticity. But he didn’t remember the exact wording.
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Do you perhaps begin to see the problem here?
Schmidt revealed this during an interview on MSNBC with Brian Williams — a man not exactly known for veracious rigor — when The Times reporter was asked about his sources.
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“We’d been working — I’d been working on a story for the past few days about the fact that Comey had written these,” Schmidt said. “We thought that was pretty significant in and of (itself).”
“And then in the process of pushing on those doors this morning, I learned more about one of these memos. And someone who had seen them recounted details to me.
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“We felt comfortable with those details,” he added.
Comfortable, how? Comfortable that you could increase ad revenue by printing unfounded details about their possible existence and contents? Comfortable that your allies in the liberal mainstream media wouldn’t question your credibility the way they should? Comfortable that you couldn’t do any more damage to your journalistic integrity than being employed by The New York Times had already done?
Well, as it turned out, he was right on all counts, apparently.
Here’s the interview:
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The New York Times: All the news that’s fit to get from some guy who may have seen a document that someone wrote about someone else but doesn’t entirely know the exact wording, because that’ll do.
In other words, this is all based on an elaborate media-endorsed game of telephone. There is literally is just as much evidence that Donald Trump asked James Comey to shut down the Flynn investigation as there is of an alleged incident on the night of June 4, 1985, when a sick Chicago-area teenager named Ferris Bueller supposedly passed out at 31 Flavors.
Now, I will readily admit I have no idea whether this memo exists in the form this source says it does or whether it doesn’t. That puts me in the same boat as Michael Schmidt, who published the story. If it exists and the events it depicts are real, it is serious.
However, until we see it under subpoena, I think that these memos are something we ought to hold a great deal of skepticism about.
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H/T Pat Dollard
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