Crossed Arrows

Tapper is not allowed to rewrite his horrible history of propagating the Russia collusion hoax.

On Jan. 12, 2017, I appeared on a CNN panel to discuss current events. It was memorable, and not just because we were taping from the roof of a building near the U.S. Capitol as part of the outlet’s special coverage of Trump’s first inauguration. Just as we were about to go on, we were significantly delayed by President Barack Obama surprising Vice President Joe Biden with a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

As I recall, there were maybe five or six of us on set, including former Obama political appointee Jim Sciutto and host Jake Tapper, two of the four authors of the most important story of the entire Russia collusion hoax. “Intel chiefs presented Trump with claims of Russian efforts to compromise him” had been published just two days prior, followed up by BuzzFeed publishing the actual document claiming widespread collusion between Trump and Russia. That document — which nine months later was revealed to have been secretly bought and paid for by Hillary Clinton and the Democrat National Committee — included salacious lies about Trump supposedly paying prostitutes to urinate on a bed that the Obamas had slept in during a visit to a fancy Moscow hotel. The hysteria was such that many people wondered if Donald Trump would make it to the inauguration.

It may sound crazy now, but Washington, D.C. at that time was full of people who either believed or pretended to believe that Donald Trump really had colluded with Russia to steal the election.

I was one of the exceedingly few who didn’t. I thought Hillary Clinton’s Russia information operation was silly before the election, and when she turned to it as an explanation of her loss, I thought a likelier explanation was that Americans liked Trump’s policies and disliked hers. I said so on television during December, when faulty and weak intelligence assessments from the Obama administration were issued in an effort to legitimize her stance.

Biden’s Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony finally ended and the regular programming began. Evan Perez, a third co-author on the big story (Carl Bernstein being the fourth), did a report from a different location about a rare statement from known liar James Clapper, Obama’s Director of National Intelligence. In his statement, Clapper claimed to have been dismayed by the leaks that led to the CNN story and said he did “not believe the leaks came from within the IC,” meaning intelligence community.

Tapper Defends His Russia Collusion Hoax

Before I tell you what happened next, I need to explain why I’ve never told this story publicly before. During commercial breaks and while remote reporters are on air, people on television sets share personal stories, funny jokes, and information about stories they’re working on. I have long treated on-set interactions that are not broadcast as not to be discussed.

But in the same way that a reporter can publicly disclose an anonymous source who burns them with bad information, Tapper and CNN are causing serious harm to the country with their revisionist history of their own key role in the Russia collusion hoax. It’s become a matter of conscience that I stop hiding what I witnessed at CNN.

In his debate Sunday with J.D. Vance, an extremely emotional and petulant Tapper asked no policy questions, choosing instead to talk almost exclusively about the mean things that neoconservatives such as Gen. John Kelly and former Rep. Liz Cheney have to say about Trump. In an amazing coincidence, this is also a major closing argument of the Kamala Harris presidential campaign. Vance highlighted the unimportant nature of Tapper’s questions, noted that the claims were credibly disputed, and kept trying to turn the conversation to important policy distinctions between the two campaigns.

Vance also noted Tapper’s problems with “integrity,” highlighting his media outlet’s leading role in driving the hysteria surrounding the dangerous Russia collusion conspiracy.

Tapper claimed, falsely, that all he and his colleagues did was report that the FBI was investigating the matter. He further claimed, falsely, that his viewers would not have been led to believe that Trump had conspired with Russia:

VANCE: Ask yourself a basic question about network integrity. You guys talked about the Russia hoax nonstop.

TAPPER: The FBI was investigating it. The FBI was investigating it. So we — so we covered them.

VANCE: And so you took the words of unnamed FBI agents and put them on your network as if they were the gospel truth. You did it again and again. A viewer of your network would’ve believed that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin conspired in 2016.

TAPPER: No.

VANCE: That was totally and preposterously false.

TAPPER: No —

VANCE: That’s why —

TAPPER: What you just said is false. We covered an FBI investigation. I don’t know why you want to talk about the FBI investigation.

VANCE: You covered it in a way that gave credence to anonymous sources, accusations. You did it yourself. Your network did it, Jake. But again, can we talk about the issues that Americans care most about?

Nothing Vance said was false, even if it understated the mendacity of CNN’s massive role in fanning the flames of the Russia collusion hoax. More on that in a bit.

Grabbing Wrists

Back on the roof in January of 2017, Evan Perez was shown on television reading and reporting on Clapper’s statement from a remote location. Tapper and his colleagues interpreted the statement as confirmation of their story and a repudiation of Trump’s dismissal of the Russia collusion story as false.

While Perez’s package was airing, and at the point he read Clapper saying that he didn’t think the leak came from the intelligence community, Sciutto said that he was pretty sure Clapper knew the leak came from the intelligence community “because …,” he said, trailing off as he rolled his hands suggestively and somewhat like a football referee very slowly calling a false start. He said it for all to hear, though I’m not sure anyone else other than Jake Tapper, who he was sitting to the right of, and I heard and understood. Tapper squeezed Sciutto’s left wrist the way my mom used to squeeze my wrist at church when I was being too loud. I interpreted this message roughly as “stop talking you idiot.”

Sciutto was a former Obama administration political appointee in the State Department. It wasn’t clear if he was saying that Clapper had leaked to him or one of his three co-authors, a Clapper aide had leaked to CNN, or merely that Clapper knew Comey or one of his aides was leaking to CNN.

It may be hard to remember, but at this point in the Russia collusion information operation, people knew almost nothing. Few if any people realized the FBI was corrupt. People didn’t even realize Comey’s central role running the scam. As far as they knew, and would be told incessantly by Tapper, the intelligence alleging Russia collusion came from a British super spy and was so credible that it was being taken extremely seriously by trustworthy intelligence agencies. Incoming National Security Advisor Mike Flynn had not yet been ousted in an FBI setup that included criminal leaks. Attorney General Jeff Sessions hadn’t recused himself from his job after he was leaked against. We didn’t know that four affiliates of the Trump campaign had been spied on. We didn’t know that the FBI had lied to the FISA Court to get wiretaps on one of them. We didn’t know about all of the unmasking and leaking against incoming Trump administration officials. We really knew nothing about how corrupt and political the deep state was. And we didn’t yet understand that major media existed almost exclusively as regime mouthpieces, uncritically serving as leak receptacles for the information operations they run against the American people.

After we were done that day, Tapper came up to me on the roof — something he rarely did when I saw him at CNN — and told me that he really wanted to get me on his Sunday show. I perceived this as an attempt to keep me quiet about what I had witnessed. It failed, and I began writing immediately about how the dossier story was an information operation being fueled by top officials in the intelligence community. I published “Top-Level Intel Officers’ War Against Donald Trump Is Bad For The Country,” a few days later.

I was able to write that piece, as well as spend the next few years confidently fighting the Russia collusion hoax under unbelievable resistance, because of Jim Sciutto and Jake Tapper’s actions that day. I already doubted the Russia collusion hoax because I knew actual Trump voters, but that day I realized that even the authors of the signature Russia collusion article knew that it was an intelligence community leak operation and were uncritically regurgitating it. If I knew enough to do what I did based on that tiny interaction between Jim Sciutto and Jake Tapper, Jake Tapper sure as hell knew enough to not take part in the regime’s information operation he promulgated every day for the next few years.

Tapper is trying to hide now, inaccurately saying he merely reported what government operatives leaked to him. What he did was much worse. But even if that was all he did, it would be indefensible.

In a 2013 New Yorker essay on Bob Woodward, John Cassidy wrote, “The real rap on Woodward isn’t that he makes things up. It’s that he takes what powerful people tell him at face value; that his accounts are shaped by who coöperates with him and who doesn’t; and that they lack context, critical awareness, and, ultimately, historic meaning. In a 1996 essay for the New York Review of Books, Joan Didion wrote that ‘measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent’ from Woodward’s post-Watergate books, which are notable mainly for ‘a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured.’”

Amen, and amen. A real reporter does not operate as a leak receptacle for nefarious government agents. A real reporter knows that if the intelligence agencies are going out of their way to manufacture a story, he should at the very least be extremely skeptical and ideally he should tell the truth about intelligence agencies leaking in order to hurt a political opponent. Jake Tapper wasn’t “covering” an FBI investigation into Russia collusion. He was willing to work with them in an information operation alleging that the 2016 election was stolen. If I knew it was all a big scam by Jan. 12, 2017, he knew even earlier.

It Wasn’t Just Coverage of An FBI Investigation

Hillary Clinton and DNC operatives had spent the better part of 2016 trying to push their Russia collusion disinformation operation out to anybody who would run with it. It was so weak that almost no one bit and those who did were exclusively partisan activists. They had, however, managed to get the FBI to run wild with it, even using it to help secure a wiretap to spy on an American.

But the point was really to get the made-up dossier out into the public. Clinton and the DNC designed and developed the Russia collusion dossier through Fusion GPS. That group claimed that the author of the dossier was Christopher Steele, who they pitched to the press as some kind of former British super spy. He turned out to be something of a politically motivated joke who had outsourced the collection of information to a guy who seemed to brainstorm outlandish ideas for the dossier with his drinking buddies and who had previously been the subject of an inconclusive FBI counterintelligence investigation into whether he was a Russian spy. And the “most important contributor” to the Russia collusion hoax dossier was identified by the Wall Street Journal as a disgruntled Russian public relations executive with a reported drinking problem.

Even years before that all slowly came out, no serious journalist would touch the dossier of made-up stories and unsubstantiated claims because they would almost certainly get sued. It was a real conundrum for Democrats. And there was a real problem inside intelligence agencies. They had just spent the previous year running an insane investigation into whether Trump was himself a Russian spy and had gone after key people associated with his campaign, including incoming National Security Advisor Mike Flynn.

At an Oval Office meeting on Jan. 5, 2017, FBI Director James Comey discussed what to do about the Russia collusion operation with President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and National Security Advisor Susan Rice. Obama gave guidance about how to perpetuate the Russia collusion hoax investigations. They discussed whether and how to withhold national security information, likely including details of the investigation into Trump himself, from the incoming Trump national security team. Imagine if Mike Flynn learned that Comey’s people had been spying on Trump campaign affiliates and investigating him.

An ostensibly similar briefing about Russian interference efforts was given to Trump on Jan. 6, after which Comey privately briefed Trump on the “pee tape” allegation contained in the Clinton-funded dossier. The extra briefing was because the intelligence couldn’t be included in an official intelligence report as it was that much of a joke and hadn’t been verified by any legitimate institution, even if the FBI had used it to secure a warrant on an American. Comey told Trump — and later memorialized in memos — that he was giving the briefing because CNN was “looking for a news hook” in order to publish a story about the dossier and he wanted to warn Trump about it.

You will never guess the news hook CNN used to publish their story about the dossier. OK, you did guess and yes, it was that Comey had briefed Trump about the dossier!

The leak of the briefing of Trump was used to legitimize a ridiculous dossier full of allegations the FBI knew to be false and that multiple news organizations had previously refused to report on for lack of substantiation, and it created a cloud of suspicion over Trump’s incoming administration by insinuating he was being blackmailed by Russia. BuzzFeed, using the CNN story as justification, published the full dossier hours later. It was all very convenient.

Incidentally, Jake Tapper was livid with Ben Smith, the editor of BuzzFeed, for publishing the actual dossier after Jake’s story ran. He said “collegiality wise it was you stepping on my d–k.”

“I think your move makes the story less serious and credible,” he said, adding, “I think you damaged its impact.”

He was right. Tapper had carefully written the story with his colleagues to make it seem like the Clinton-funded dossier was non-partisan and extremely serious. When Smith published what it actually was, everyone outside of DC and New York could see it was hilariously juvenile. It was so stupid that you had to be an idiot to believe it.

On that note, Vance said CNN viewers believed the Russia collusion hoax, which Tapper denied. In fact, a 2018 poll showed that a shocking 67 percent of Democrats believed that Russia had tampered with vote totals in the 2016 election. Even in 2020, years after it was debunked by real reporters, a majority of Americans believed Tapper’s daily drumbeat of disinformation about Russia colluding with Trump. (Tapper once mocked the majority of Republicans who believed, accurately, that the Obama administration had spied on the Trump campaign.)

This is CNN

To take just a few examples of how Tapper and CNN pushed the Russia collusion hoax relentlessly, let’s first note that they hired Clapper and other intelligence officials involved in the information operation to help amplify the Russia collusion hoax with their on-air commentary.

In February 2017, CNN reported another blockbuster, that was also false, “US investigators corroborate some aspects of the Russia dossier.” Jake Tapper kept saying that the dossier had been corroborated for years, until the story became an embarrassment.

Also in February 2017, my husband, then a Senior Writer at The Weekly Standard, wrote a media criticism column for that magazine on the problems surrounding the credulous use of anonymous sources to report on the alleged Trump-Russia scandal. “It’s now widely believed that CNN jumped the gun and failed to confirm key details [of the dossier] because they were too trusting of the high-ranking Obama intelligence officials who vouched for the story,” he wrote. “Naturally, those officials remain anonymous.” This observation caused Tapper to fly off the handle and send a angry email to the editors of the Weekly Standard, which was CC’d to the other three authors of CNN’s dubious report on the dossier.

In June 2017, they were forced to pull one of their Russia-Trump conspiracy stories based on a single anonymous source — the stories were always sourced to anonymous intelligence officials — who connected Anthony Scaramucci to a Russian investment fund managed by a Kremlin-controlled bank. At least in that case three CNN journalists were fired for their shoddy work.

Also in June 2017, Jake Tapper co-authored a story claiming James Comey would dispute Donald Trump’s claim that Comey had told him three times he was not under investigation. Here’s how Tapper’s story began:

In his much-anticipated congressional testimony on Thursday, fired FBI Director James Comey will dispute President Donald Trump’s blanket claim that he was told he was not under investigation multiple times, according to sources familiar with Comey’s thinking.

Rather, one source said that Comey is expected to tell senators that he never assured Trump he was not under investigation, because such assurances would have been improper. Another source hinted that the President may have misunderstood the exact meaning of Comey’s words, especially regarding the FBI’s ongoing counterintelligence investigation.

The story got major play on CNN, with Comey’s alleged disputation being treated as credible and Trump’s claim treated as non-credible.

When Comey testified under oath, however, he not only admitted he kept telling Trump he wasn’t under investigation — contrary to the information operation that he’d helped run through leaks to the media and other means — but he had done so three times, exactly as Trump said. The first time he said it, he volunteered it without even being asked.

The story was rewritten, rather than retracted, and a bizarre note was appended at the top that said, “Comey does not directly dispute that Trump was told multiple times he was not under investigation.” What a journalistically disastrous way to say Comey “completely confirmed in every way what Trump said about being told he was not under investigation.”

In December of 2017, CNN went wild with a story claiming that congressional investigators learned Donald Trump, Jr., had been given advance notice via email about Democrat documents before they were published. The story didn’t include any evidence that the random person who emailed Trump, Jr., was correct, that his email had been opened, that he was in any way connected to Russia, or anything, really, to justify the hysteria.

But then it got worse. It turned out that CNN’s Manu Raju had completely and utterly botched the story, which he claimed was based on two anonymous sources. Instead of advance notice on Sept. 4, it was late notice on Sept. 14, well after the documents were publicly available. Clearly he just ran with a story from two people in Rep. Adam Schiff’s office who couldn’t read dates properly.

Speaking of Raju, he was a favorite and reliable leak recipient for the Democrats pushing the Russia collusion hoax (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, for example). He also helped bury the confirmation that Susan Rice was involved in unmasking Trump officials, contrary to what she had said publicly.

CNN literally ran thousands of false and misleading Russia collusion stories. Jake Tapper didn’t limit his embrace of hoaxes to the Russia collusion hoax, mind you. He also gave credence to Julie Swetnick’s false claims about Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the “fine people” hoax, COVID hysteria, and the most extreme Democrat lawfare.

After the 2016 election, I doubted the Russia collusion hoax that took Washington by storm because I knew actual Trump voters and because I’d lived through other moments of hysteria, including the march to the Iraq War based on fraudulent intelligence assessments. But the confidence I had in reporting that the Russia collusion hoax was a nefarious information operation was thanks to Jake Tapper and Jim Sciutto revealing it as such on set that day. In a way, I’m thankful, because I never would have had the courage to take on all of the media to report the truth.

But Tapper is not allowed to rewrite his horrible history or the horrible history of CNN. He and the network he appears on should not be treated as credible.

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Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is the Editor-in-Chief of The Federalist. She is Senior Journalism Fellow at Hillsdale College and a Fox News contributor. She is the co-author of Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court. She is the author of “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.” Reach her at mzhemingway@thefederalist.com