Veteran reporter Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer questioned the reporting from The New York Times that was published in 2016 during the campaign between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Among the many false things that the Times reported was the allegation that new emails were discovered related to Anthony Weiner's underage sexting case. None of the reporting was true.
MSNBC's Joy Reid said that the report "sparked a lot of questions, not just about the Justice Department's decision-making but also the FBI, because the push for that announcement was coming from the FBI's New York field office, which according to Reuters, had a faction of investigators based in the office known to be hostile to Hillary Clinton."
Last week, former FBI counterintelligence chief at the New York office, Charles McGonigal, was arrested and charged with money laundering and other concerns related to his relationship with a Russian oligarch.
"At the time, James Comey made his unprecedented public announcement in 2016, there was no bigger consumer of the Clinton email story than The New York Times," Reid explained. "They ran story after story on her emails in 2016, devoting two-thirds of the Gray Lady's front page to Comey's announcement. That was followed up a few days later with another helpful piece on Trump citing unnamed intelligence sources headlined Investigating Donald Trump, FBI sees no clear link to Russia. Something that would later be proven untrue."
Given McGonigal's charges, these stories are now being looked at in a whole new light. Writing for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Bunch penned a column about whether McGonigal was the source for those stories.
"We should be asking that," Bunch told Reid. "You know, that second story you showed about the lack of 'clear ties' between Trump and Russia. I mean, we now know that story was false. I mean, a key premise of that story was [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and Russia were not trying to help Trump win the election. Well, the U.S. intelligence community, not much after that, found that's exactly what they were doing. Who was misleading The New York Times? You know, clearly, that story hung on high-level intelligence sources. And McGonigal was basically the top spymaster in the New York office."
He also said that it appears the FBI field office in New York was also the "nexus of so much of this activity that was then leaked to the press and was overplayed by the media, especially by The New York Times. And polling bureaus said this absolutely was the decisive factor that swung enough votes in the last minute from Hillary. We should rethink everything we think we know about what happened that October. What the FBI was up to, now that we know they had this corrupt agent."
Reid noted that there were 34 people convicted that had ties to Russia from the investigations into Donald Trump and his ties to Russia during the 2016 election.
Bunch noted that Oleg Deripaska seems to be in the background of a lot of different things in the U.S., whether with Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign and now with this FBI agent.
"We now know Manafort was sharing important data from the trump campaign, polling data, and data that could have helped Russia's internet trolls know what states to target with their internet trolling," said Bunch. "He shared that with a suspected Russian intelligence agent who was also part of this triangle with Manafort and Deripaska. And how does this FBI agent who is supposed to be investigating Deripaska then end up working for him a year or two later? If that's indeed when it started. I would love to see the Times given its role in disseminating the bad information, go back. I think they should apologize for their bad coverage but they should also investigate how they were duped by these FBI agents and by their intelligence sources and share that with their readers."
He went on to say that he specifically singled out the Clinton emails piece of the story and that the media bought into all of it. They also excused Trump from a very real scandal that could have made a difference in the 2016 campaign results.
See the full conversation with Bunch below or at the link here.
The New York Times lies about Clinton and Trump www.youtube.com
