Re: All Things Russia & Ukraine
Posted: Thu Feb 09, 2023 2:28 pm
PMM's follow up post on all that is wrong with Jeff Gerth's "reporting" on RussiaGate:
CJR's Error at Word 18
CJR's Error at Word 18
..It took just 18 words into a 23,000-word series complaining about journalistic mistakes in the coverage of the investigation into Trump’s ties with Russia before Jeff Gerth made his first error.
And I’m spotting him the use of “collusion” at word 12.
Columbia Journalism Review published the series, in four parts, last week.
Gerth claimed that, “The end of the long inquiry into whether Donald Trump was colluding with Russia came in July 2019,” when Mueller testified to Congress.
There are multiple ways you might measure the end of the inquiry — on March 22, 2019 when Mueller delivered his report to Bill Barr; on May 29, 2019 when Mueller closed up shop the moment his team secured Andrew Miller’s grand jury testimony; on November 15, 2019, when a jury convicted Roger Stone; or the still undisclosed date when an ongoing investigation into whether Stone conspired to hack with Russia ended (a September 2018 warrant to Twitter seeking evidence of conspiracy, hacking, and Foreign Agent crimes, which was originally sealed in its entirety to hide from Stone the full scope of the investigation into him, was still largely sealed in April 2020).
None of those events happened in July 2019.
Gerth appears not to know about the ongoing investigation into Stone. He doesn’t mention it. He barely mentions Stone at all, just 205 words out of 23,000, or less than 1% of the entire series.
And those 205 words include mention of the WikiLeaks disclosure that came out in the same FOIA release that disclosed the referral of a conspiracy investigation involving Stone, so unlike other journalists who don’t know about the once-ongoing investigation into Stone (which is virtually all of them), Gerth should know about the Stone detail. He explicitly cites the FOIA release that first confirmed it.Trump also commuted the sentence of Roger Stone, a Trump associate, who was convicted on false-statement and obstruction charges related to his efforts in 2016 to serve as an intermediary between the campaign and WikiLeaks. Mueller “failed to resolve” the question of whether Stone had “directly communicated” with Julian Assange, the site’s founder, before the election, according to the Times.
In 2020, the 966-page report by the Senate intelligence panel went a little further. It said that WikiLeaks “very likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence influence effort” when it acquired and made public in 2016 emails from the DNC. A few months after the report was released, new information surfaced showing why the special counsel, with greater investigative powers than the Senate panel, couldn’t bring a case. The newly unredacted documents were obtained by BuzzFeed, via a Freedom of Information Act request. The Mueller team, the documents show, determined that while Russian hacking efforts were underway at the time of the releases by WikiLeaks in July 2016, “the Office did not develop sufficient admissible evidence that WikiLeaks knew of—or even was willfully blind to—that fact.” The Senate report also suggests Stone had greater involvement with the dissemination of hacked material released by WikiLeaks.
On the one hand, this is an obscure detail, one few besides me have reported. On the other hand, the fact that DOJ was continuing to investigate Roger Stone for conspiring with Russia at such time as Barr was loudly and inaccurately making claims about the Mueller investigation is not only a critical detail for someone assessing the press coverage of the investigation, but it also undermines the entire premise of Gerth’s series.
Gerth seems to think that the fact that Mueller didn’t charge conspiracy has some bearing on the merit of reporting on Trump’s ties to Russia. Mueller did prove, via three guilty pleas, a judge’s order, and a jury verdict, that Trump’s foreign policy advisor, his National Security Adviser, his personal lawyer, his campaign manager, and his rat-heck were lying to hide their ties to the Russian operation, which Gerth only mentions serially over the course of the piece. But because Mueller developed evidence of, but did not charge, a conspiracy, Gerth treats the abundant inappropriate ties between Trump’s team and the Russian operation as a conspiracy theory invented by Hillary Clinton.
And for that reason, along with the suffocating number of other errors and misrepresentations, this series is more a symptom of what Gerth claims to combat, the degree to which coverage of the Russian investigation has been swamped by tribalist takes that only serve to increase polarization, rather than the cure he fancifully imagines he is offering. Indeed, I made the effort to wade through Gerth’s interminable series in significant part because it is such a delightful exemplar of everything “Russiagate,” that frenzy of screen-cap driven claims about a complex investigation chased by self-imagined contrarians who weren’t actually engaged in journalism. It replicates so many of the claims, and in some cases, the legal and factual errors that “Russiagate” propagandists have, that my list of questions for CJR might serve as a source document for others to understand what’s in the actual record.