Trump's game of leaks: Is he playing the New York Times the same way the Russians did?
Are Trump and his team manipulating the media (yet again) by leaking hot stories and then whining about leaks?
AMANDA MARCOTTE
MAY 2, 2018 9:00AM (UTC)
In her new book, "Chasing Hillary," New York Times reporter Amy Chozick admits that she and other mainstream media reporters were duped by foreign propaganda. In a chapter titled “How I Became an Unwitting Agent of Russian Intelligence,” Chozick confesses that she and her Times colleagues allowed the need for attention — and clicks — to guide their decision to forefront largely unimportant information obtained from email hacks of Hillary Clinton's staff. Those leaks were likely the work of Russian agents, who fed the information to the newspaper (by way of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks) in order to feed a false narrative that Clinton was duplicitous and untrustworthy.
“[N]othing hurt worse than my own colleagues calling me a de facto instrument of Russian intelligence," she wrote. "The worst part was they were right.”
Perhaps after failing democracy in the worst way, you might think staff at the New York Times had learned their lesson. This week there's reason to be worried that they didn't — and not because of Link to tweet
?tfw_site=thedailybeast&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thedailybeast.com%2Fmichelle-wolf-fires-back-at-new-york-times-reporter-maggie-haberman-over-whcd-criticism" target="_blank">reporter Maggie Haberman's feigned umbrage over the White House Correspondents' Dinner, in an apparent effort to ingratiate herself with White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. (As bad as that was.) The real concern is that the Times is getting played by the Trump administration in almost the same way it got played by the Russians, which suggests the Gray Lady's staffers are still allowing the desire for breaking news to trump their civic duty.
At issue is a recent story from Michael Schmidt about a list of questions that Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller reportedly wants to ask Trump, many of them focused on questions of possible collusion with Russian agents or attempts to obstruct justice. The story isn't all that surprising in itself, but it nonetheless has that frisson of intrigue guaranteed to drive traffic: Secret documents obtained from anonymous sources, the suggestion that the Russia investigation is on the verge of a breakthrough, a hint that the president himself may soon be in the hot seat. As I write this on Tuesday evening, the story has been at the top of the Times homepage for nearly a full day, and became the basis for a dramatic episode of the popular podcast "The Daily."
But there are plenty of visible hints that the Times may be being used by the Trump administration for propaganda purposes. While Schmidt is being tight-lipped about who gave him the list of questions — he denies getting it directly from Trump's lawyers directly — there's good reason to believe the leak came from someone close to the president. As Schmidt indicates, the list of questions came out of a meeting between Mueller's team and Trump's lawyers, who are continuing to negotiate over Mueller's desire to interview the president. It's unlikely that Mueller or his investigators are the leakers — the special counsel's office is notoriously tight-lipped — and Trump's associates are the only realistic alternative source.
As soon as the Times story appeared, Trump and his cronies snapped into action, publicly rending their garments and lamenting the evils of the leak — a leak that almost certainly came from someone on Team Trump. Sean Hannity, who speaks to Trump in private on the regular, appeared on Fox News shortly thereafter to say, "These New York Times questions, you could use it to burn in your fireplace tonight."
more
https://www.salon.com/2018/05/02/trumps-game-of-leaks-is-he-playing-the-new-york-times-the-same-way-the-russians-did/
= new reply since forum marked as read
... if they're the questions I heard on NBR ("How did you feel about ..."
then I don't think they came from Mueller. I'd guess someone at the White House is throwing up a straw man.
Why would Mueller waste his time on touchy-feely questions like those?
I smell a rat.