As I was reading Jonathan Turley's assessment of the legal exposure of the Russiagate hoaxers, now that DNI Tulsi Gabbard has been declassifying the documents that expose the corrupt individuals who perpetrated it, I couldn't get past one paragraph he put in the piece:
Not surprisingly, the media, which spent years repeating the false Russian collusion claims, is doing a full-court press to kill the story. Yet, many of these key figures are retaining counsel in anticipation of the unfolding investigation. Many previously secured contracts with MSNBC or CNN, or book deals, where they doubled down on the false claims detailed in these new documents.
What is so striking about the fact that the media embraced these hoaxers is that there could not have been a single news executive who hired them who didn't know they were hoaxers, and even perjurers in some cases.
They were hired because they were perpetrating a hoax, and the media was in on it.
Fox just posted my column on "the usual suspects" emerging from the declassified documents on the Russian collusion investigation. The public is finally learning the details on what may be the greatest political hoax in history. https://t.co/vZNh8TK2Iq
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) July 26, 2025
When I went through Tulsi Gabbard's documents, not a thing in them surprised me. In fact, much of the information was known, at least in bits and pieces. There was certainly new information that solidified the case against Brennan or Comey, for instance, but all the dots were there before, and the documents merely connected lines we already knew were there.
NEW: NY Times Pulitzer winner Jeff Gerth: "The media isn't looking for Russiagate scoops nor will they fairly present the ones others get if they reflect poorly on their prior reporting. Theyre in a defensive posture & arent inclined to report deeply on anything that helps Trump"
— Paul Sperry (@paulsperry_) July 27, 2025
That's why the media is ignoring the release of the documents. They had all the evidence, knew how to connect the dots, and they didn't want people to ask too many questions about why they had been paying the hoaxers to lie.
Turley points out that NBC and MSNBC contributor John Brennan, the former communist turned CIA chief, is the most exposed legally. He has repeatedly testified under oath to facts that are irrefutably contradicted by the documents that were released.
Brennan is arguably the most at risk in the new disclosures, which appear to contradict his prior testimony before Congress. On May 23, 2017, Brennan testified that the infamous Steele dossier "wasn’t part of the corpus of intelligence information that we had. It was not in any way used as a basis for the Intelligence Community Assessment that was done."
However, the new material shows that Brennan was the key figure insisting on the inclusion of the Steele dossier in an intelligence assessment, suggesting that the Russians did influence the election in favor of Trump.
Brennan not only intervened to include the dossier but overruled the CIA’s two most senior Russia experts, who said it "did not meet even the most basic tradecraft standards." One analyst recounted how "[Brennan] refused to remove it, and when confronted with the dossier’s main flaws, responded, ‘Yes, but doesn’t it ring true?’"
This is the man that NBC News put out as the face of factual intelligence analysis. A proven liar now, but we didn't need to see the documents to know that Brennan committed perjury many times before Congress.
It was for his skills in lying that NBC hired him.
James Clapper is CNN's national security analyst, and we all saw him commit perjury about US surveillance of citizens before Congress and get away with it. CNN hired Clapper for his skills at lying as well.
James Clapper, former DNI under Obama, is expecting the worst and said that he has "lawyered up." Clapper was in the briefing in July 2016 when Obama was told that Clinton was planning to create a Russian conspiracy narrative. In November 2016, Clapper received an assessment from the intelligence community that Russia was "probably not trying … to influence the election by using cyber means." He also received talking points from staff on Dec. 7, 2016, "Foreign adversaries did not use cyberattacks on election infrastructure to alter the US Presidential election outcome."
On Dec. 9, 2016, another report stated that "Russian and criminal actors did not impact recent U.S. election results by conducting malicious cyber activities against election infrastructure." That Presidential Daily Brief was scheduled to be published on Dec. 9, but CDNI Clapper’s office stopped its publication "based on some new guidance."
Clapper later joined Obama with Brennan, Susan Rice, John Kerry, Loretta Lynch, Andrew McCabe and others, in a meeting where a new assessment was ordered that would detail the "tools Moscow used and actions it took to influence the 2016 election." Brennan then reportedly handpicked the analysts who seemed to flip the earlier assessments without any credible intelligence.
In a 2018 interview with the Harvard Gazette, Clapper continued to spread the false narrative, referring to the high-confidence judgment that "Putin directly ordered the hacking and election interference." He added, "I think they [Russians] actually influenced the outcome."
Clapper later added to his tarnished legacy by signing the letter with more than 50 former intelligence officials dismissing the Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 presidential election as having the [hall]marks of "Russian disinformation."
CNN might have jumped through some intellectual hoops to defend Clapper over his lies to Congress and his role in the Russiagate hoax--I don't know what hoops they might be--but the Hunter Biden laptop fiasco should have been an arrow through the heart of his credibility. Yet they pay the guy handsomely to lie, still. Because lying is what they want him to do.
Comey is still trotted out and treated like a credible source, despite his many provable lies and the fact that he is known to have violated many national security laws, and even admitted as much. It's not so much that none of that matters to the media--it does, in fact--it's that his lies are exactly what they want to sell the public. So they bolster his credibility.
Andrew McCabe still shows up all the time in the media as a CNN contributor. He, too, is a proven liar and was fired from the FBI because he lied, yet CNN pushes him as yet another anti-Trump commentator and as a totally credible analyst of perfidy.
And so on. All these men will face legal scrutiny and even, perhaps, real consequences for their actions, but not so the media figures who picked up the balls and ran with them. It was the media that turned absurd allegations into presidency-threatening political issues, impeachment inquiries, and tarnished Trump's reputation and hampered his presidency.
Comey, Clapper, Brennan, and McCabe are not exactly bit players in the game, but they weren't capable of doing all that damage without the media deciding they wanted to destroy the president and divide the country.
They are still doing it today. I get emails all the time about how horrible and cruel Trump is on the immigration issue because the media picks and chooses what they tell the public about incidents. They publish hoaxes, such as the woman kidnapped and sent to a warehouse, or the grandfather (who was dead) deported to Guatemala.
The media turns a human trafficking case in which unaccompanied migrant children were being exploited as farm labor at a pot farm, surrounded by sex offenders, into a cruel raid targeting "farmers." An MS-13 member is known as the "Maryland Man."
The Pravda Media has far more power than any of these men in a way that counts: they could have chosen to discredit what they knew to be lies and destroy the hoax cases against the president, or do what they did: amplify the hoaxes.
The inside-the-government malefactors held bureaucratic power, but without the power of the media behind them, their hoax would have fallen apart in months, not years, and the reputations of the hoaxers would be as good as Jussie Smollett's.
The Deep State #resistance would be formidable no matter what, but when their power is amplified a thousandfold, they are given the power to stall a presidency.
For years, these crooks have dined out on their criminality--the media rewarded them for it.
I want to see them rot in jail, of course. But I would be even happier if all the media folks who knowingly perpetrated these hoaxes were sitting in jail cells next to them.
Editor's Note: The Trump administration is exposing Barack Obama and his administration's Russian Collusion Hoax.
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