In this episode I discuss a Vanity Fair article in which the author Bess Levin attempts to “debunk” the finding of Special Counsel John Durham that an executive for a telecom contractor named Rodney Joffe leaked information regarding communications by Donald Trump to the Hillary Clinton campaign via its lawyer Michael Sussman. The archived link is below:
https://archive.is/Dub0W
Levin’s defense of Sussman & Joffe’s actions is startling in its disingenuousness. She uses four points that are not really arguments:
Sussman’s communications with the CIA were known in October already and are not new. OK, this leaves the question of WHY of all things a Clinton campaign lawyer was contacting the CIA with leaked information from their opponent.
Durham had not said that the White House was “infiltrated”. This is a semantic game. When information is procured via leak, the person doing it can be called an “infiltrator”, “mole”, “confidential source” or any other similar term.
Durham had never claimed that Clinton’s campaign paid Joffe’s company. But no one is alleging that the transaction was between the campaign and the company, Neustar. Instead every news report indicates that Joffe had been offered a job within the future Clinton Administration in a cybersecurity capacity.
The filing did not claim that the White House data shared with the CIA was from during the Trump era. Here Levin is committing a tremendous lie by omission in that she forgets to mention that some of the data shared was not from the White House but rather from two Trump properties.
At the end of this episode I make the analogy that is through obfuscation like this that past controversies such as alternate proposals regarding the JFK assassination were dismissed as “conspiracy theories”.
How the #Durham filing unleashed a wave of #fakenews from the media