Russiagate Shows How Media Use Fake ‘Fact Checks’ To Launder Info Ops

When Trump began calling out the hoax in real time, the ‘fact-checkers’ swooped in to dismiss his claims.

The  Federalist 

The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler recently announced he would be leaving the outlet after more than a decade as its lead “fact-checker.” The role of “fact-checkers” — invented by the left-wing press — has served not to clarify the facts but rather to manipulate public perception. And nowhere is this role more apparent than in how the media’s “fact-checkers” — including Kessler — covered the Russia collusion hoax, helping legitimize a Hillary Clinton-campaign-funded lie aimed at undermining and sabotaging President Donald Trump.

Newly declassified documents show that then-President Barack Obama and his high-ranking members of the intelligence community included the now-debunked Steele dossier in their 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that attempted to link President Donald Trump and his campaign to Russia. The dossier was opposition research funded by the Clinton campaign. Despite warnings from intelligence experts that the dossier was flawed, the dossier was nonetheless included in the ICA and served as the basis for furthering the Russia collusion hoax.

But when Trump began calling out the hoax in real time, the “fact-checkers” swooped in to dismiss his claims.

Trump posted on Oct. 19, 2017, that “workers of firm involved with the discredited and Fake Dossier take the 5th. Who paid for it, Russia, the FBI or the Dems (or all)?”

Rather than investigate the substance of this question, Kessler instead dismissed Trump’s concern in a post: “It’s worth rereading the dossier these days. Some material unverified or salacious. But you can see why the FBI saw it as a Rosetta Stone.”

Kessler’s post, as The Federalist’s Editor-In-Chief Mollie Hemingway pointed out, “is a great example of how ‘fact’ ‘checking’ is almost without exception just the laundering of Democrat info ops with another layer of supposed credibility.”

In another instance, Kessler emphatically declared that “the Russia investigation did not start with the Steele dossier.”

But as The Federalist’s Elle Purnell explained, three days after the Clinton campaign peddled its bogus Steele dossier to intelligence officials, the FBI began its investigation — known as Crossfire Hurricane — into the Trump campaign in hopes of finding “collusion between Trump and Russia to steal the 2016 election.”

Kessler also wrote multiple “fact checks” asserting that the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) conclusively proved that “Russians influenced the election in an effort to help Trump get elected.” But as the newly declassified documents show, while the ICA found Russian President Vladimir Putin did order “cyber influence operations” and tried to “undermine faith in the US democratic process,” the conclusion that Putin favored Trump over Clinton “did not adhere to the tenets of the ICD [Intelligence Community Directive] standards.”

Kessler wasn’t alone. PolitiFact’s Angie Drobnic Holan named Trump’s statement that this “Russian election interference is a ‘made-up story’” as its 2017 “Lie of the Year.”

But as it would turn out, the narrative that Trump and Putin colluded and that Putin intervened to help Trump in the 2016 race was completely manufactured. Obama and then-CIA Director John Brennan ignored the advice of intelligence experts who raised red flags about the Steele dossier and included the Clinton-funded opposition research in the ICA in order to legitimize Clinton’s election lies. In addition, Obama intelligence officials based the ICA’s erroneous finding that Putin wanted Trump to win the 2016 election on “one scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment of a sentence from a single HUMINT [human intelligence] report,” according to the recently released House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence investigation.

The Associated Press followed the same playbook. Calvin Woodward, Eric Tucker, and Hope Yen fact-checked Trump’s assertion that he was vindicated by the Mueller report.

“Mueller did not vindicate Trump in ‘total’ in the Russia probe,” the authors wrote. But Trump was vindicated; Mueller did in fact determine there was no evidence of collusion.

Later Woodward and Yen pushed a purported “fact-check” asserting that “this refrain about the Mueller report stating there was no collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign is wrong” before clarifying that Mueller “did not assess whether that occurred because it is not a legal term” and that “the investigation did not collect sufficient evidence to establish criminal charges on that front.”

CNN’s Jeremy Diamond “fact-check[ed]” Trump in May of 2019 for “repeatedly undermin[ing] the US intelligence community’s findings of Russian interference in 2016.” But the newly declassified intelligence report makes clear that the “intelligence community’s findings” that Trump questioned were, in fact, politically manipulated.

The pattern of dismissal, denial, and selective framing from so-called “fact checkers” wasn’t accidental — it was a coordinated effort to control the narrative and run propaganda for Democrats. The propaganda press was committed to laundering what is now known undeniably as a Democrat-information operation (the Steele dossier) as fact.

And the worst part? Kessler and the media are still complicit.