The Extraordinary Rebuke Of CNN By Central Intelligence Agency And New York Times

Jim Sciutto was a political appointee of President Obama working on foreign affairs when he was hired by CNN in 2013 to be its Chief National Security Correspondent.  The network never disclosed this fact to its viewers.

Scuitto reported on CNN’s air the CIA had extracted a Russian asset over concerns President Trump had mishandled classified information that might “somehow reveal details about intelligence operations.”

Scant hours after CNN’s reporting, the New York Times cited sources contradicting the story writing, “CIA officials made the arduous decision in late 2016 [emphasis mine] to offer to extract the source from Russia weeks before [emphasis mine] Trump even took office.”

The informant, recruited by the CIA decades ago, has been described as a mid-level Russian official who was outside Vladimir Putin's inner circle, and yet saw Putin on a regular basis and was privy to high-level information. This Moscow spy's intel was key to the U.S. intelligence community's conclusion that Putin himself ordered a Russian interference campaign in the U.S. 2016 election.

Former intelligence officials said, "There was no public evidence that Mr. Trump directly endangered the source" and current U.S. officials "insisted that media scrutiny of the agency’s sources alone was the impetus for the extraction," according to the Times.

The asset was offered extraction in 2016 over concerns about his safety but refused causing some American counterintelligence officials to become skeptical of his trustworthiness.

Even publicly there was talk that CNN's report missed the mark. Former CIA official Philip Mudd, a CNN counterterrorism analyst, took issue with the report's "political angle" involving President Trump.

“I question whether this angle of the story about whether the President’s engagement with intelligence was actually a spur in the extraction of the informant," Mudd said Monday on The Lead with Jake Tapper. "I suspect there were other issues here."

CIA spokeswoman Brittany Bramell said, "CNN's narrative that the Central Intelligence Agency makes life-or-death decisions based on anything other than objective analysis and sound collection is simply false. Misguided speculation that the President's handling of our nation's most sensitive intelligence — which he has access to each and every day — drove an alleged exfiltration operation is inaccurate.”

Numerous other holes quickly surfaced in CNN's reporting. Commentator Aaron Mate pointed out in a Twitter thread that several major news organizations had previously cited a high-level official in the Russian government as a source — suggesting the Intelligence Community itself, not Trump, had compromised the spy.

NYT now reporting that @jimsciutto's core claim -- that CIA extracted a Russian source in part due to worries about "Trump’s handling of intelligence -- is bunk. Current & former officials blame media leaks -- that came from the intel community itself. https://t.co/AFKXbXap41 pic.twitter.com/JVz5XIZbob

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) September 10, 2019

CNN Asks: What Happened The Last Time A President Chose America’s Enemies Over Its Friends?

President Trump’s arch-enemy appears to be more popular with viewers interested in lifestyles of the rich and famous than news.  As their ratings continue to collapse, the only good day the cable news nitwits had during the second quarter of 2018 was the day of the Royal Wedding.  When it comes to fluff and pageantry CNN is your go-to source.  When it comes to actual news, an audience seeking to be well-informed ditch the network  faster than a toupee in a hurricane.

In a twisted version of the TV game show Jeopardy CNN asked, “What happened the last time a President chose America’s enemies over its friends?”

The lowly cable outfit published a repulsive piece authored by Manisha Sinha. The Indian-born American historian at the University of Connecticut suggested, “Donald Trump likes to compare himself to Andrew Jackson, but the Andrew he really resembles is Andrew Johnson. What they have in common are delusions of personal grandeur and a tainted ascent to the presidency. Trump was elected by a minority of the American electorate, with help from the vagaries of the Electoral College system and from considerable Russian interference.”

Sinha continues, “Johnson became President thanks to an assassin's bullet. While Johnson immodestly compared himself to Jesus and Moses, Trump claims he is the best at everything, even boasting recently on Twitter that his popularity among Republicans exceeds that of Abraham Lincoln.”

“Indeed, pundits have likened today's partisan divisions to those of the Civil War era. But they more closely resemble the politics of Reconstruction, the period after the war when for the first time in history, an American president, Johnson, was impeached by the House of Representatives.”

“But the resemblance between the two men goes deeper. Johnson's white-supremacist views were blatant and his policies precipitated a constitutional crisis that put the President at loggerheads with Congress and his own party, the Republicans.”

This “expert” takes great care to emphasize the following: 

The Republican Party then was the liberal party of anti-slavery, big government and Lincoln. The Democrats were the party of white supremacy, Southern slaveholders and states' rights.

Sinha rather conveniently misses a critical point that is easily substantiated from a host of reputable sources which document Johnson was a Democrat. In 1862, Lincoln appointed him Military Governor of Tennessee.  In 1864 Republicans nominated Johnson for Vice President.  Lincoln was elected to a second term but was assassinated five months later in 1865.

CNN’s biased propaganda included a video accompanying Sinha’s screed featuring Richard Clarke, former National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection and Counterterrorism for Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush.

Clarke, an alleged liar and obvious Never Trumper opined, “The U.S role in the world is diminishing and the overriding thing that connects all of this is diplomatic malpractice by the President of the United States.  He is trying to do diplomacy, high-stakes diplomacy, in multiple arenas by himself; shooting from the hip.  This is a man who has no experience in national security, no experience in international diplomacy, who’s ignoring his advisers and we see the results.”

“Our influence, our respect around the world is diminishing.  The prospects of war are inching up because of his tweets, because of his impulse, because of his inexperience and the insistence on doing it himself.”

So, Tapper “Fixes” His Take On Feinstein Apology AFTER She “Fixes” Her Take On It

The dreaded white box truck…

Sen Feinstein apologizes to Sen Grassley for not telling him about transcript release https://t.co/Og2rRiRrJC @mkraju reports #TheLead

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) January 11, 2018

Deleting a tweet headline from our show about Feinstein apology to Grassley to rewrite it more precisely — apology was for not telling him ahead of time, NOT for releasing transcript. Thanks

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) January 11, 2018

If we deserve to know what Glenn Simpson said, why did Feinstein redact so much of it? Why did she exclude all the exhibits? Why did she hide what he testified about Fusion's FBI contacts? https://t.co/WX1Ayzezy9

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) January 10, 2018

“The American people deserve the opportunity to see what he said and judge for themselves,” Senator Dianne Feinstein said, explaining her decision to release the transcript of Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson's testimony. https://t.co/I67zhQglJO

— NYT Politics (@nytpolitics) January 10, 2018