Holy cow, what an abject lesson in media-created nuttery this is.  Eric Wemple writes a column in the Washington Post skewering Rachel Maddow for selling her gullible audience on the credibility of the Steele Dossier for almost three years.  However, judging by the reaction to Wemple’s tweet, the left-wingnuts still believe the Dossier is viable and accurate despite the only source, Steele’s primary sub-source, saying the Dossier material was completely bunk; “mostly innuendo”, “bar-talk”, and “internet rumor/gossip”.

Then there’s this:

There’s a cognitive pathology that clings to denial as a survival mechanism at this level.  It’s called cognitive dissonance, or what David Mamet referred to as an inherent need for the collective left to pretend not to know things in order to retain their views.

Let there be no doubt the U.S. media created this.  It might seem odd in hindsight, but CTH wrote about where we would be today, two years ago.

January 2018:  What exactly do you think the American institutional media will do with a Justice department reality, within the real DOJ and FBI story, that factually ends up in a direction 180° divergent from their current years-long travel?

The media have fully invested themselves in eighteen months of narrative distribution in only one direction. Not a single MSM entity has questioned their travel as a result of false leaks and false sources in the totality of time they have covered the DOJ and FBI story.

Nothing within their collective need to will-an-outcome, will change the media’s proximity to facts when the truthful story behind the DOJ and FBI corruption is finally exposed. The media are so far away from the place where this story ends, they have no inherent capability to even begin to travel in the opposite direction, toward the truth.

The only way they could align with the truth is to admit that virtually every scintilla of their reportage over the past 18 months three years was inherently false. There’s not a single media outlet capable of doing that.

We shared a discussion thread two years ago about how the media are enmeshed within the story of the DOJ and FBI corruption. The media engagements with the parties swirling around the FBI, DOJ and Clinton-Steele Dossier are so pervasive they cannot reasonably report on any aspect of the story without exposing their own duplicity.

Michael Isikoff highlighted how enmeshed media is with the dossier story when he admitted his reporting was being used by the DOJ and FBI to advance the political objectives of the intelligence community. Additionally, FBI investigator Peter Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page were shown in their text messages to be leaking stories from the Clinton Investigation, the Trump investigation and the Mueller investigation to journalists at Politico, The Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. –SEE HERE–

FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was busted by the Inspector General leaking stories to the media and then lying about it to INSD and IG investigators.

FBI Director James Comey admitted to leaking stories to the New York Times, and even hired his friend Andrew Richman (off-the-books), gave him access to FBI and NSA databases, and then leaked information to Richman along with another friend Benjamin Wittes at Lawfare blog.

Lest we forget, the IG report on how the FBI handled the Clinton investigation revealed that dozens of FBI officials were actually taking bribes from the media for information:

IG REPORT – We identified numerous FBI employees, at all levels of the organization and with no official reason to be in contact with the media, who were nevertheless in frequent contact with reporters. Attached to this report as Attachments E and F are two link charts that reflect the volume of communications that we identified between FBI employees and media representatives in April/May and October 2016. We have profound concerns about the volume and extent of unauthorized media contacts by FBI personnel that we have uncovered during our review.

[…] We do not believe the problem is with the FBI’s policy, which we found to be clear and unambiguous. Rather, we concluded that these leaks highlight the need to change what appears to be a cultural attitudeamong many in the organization. (link to pdf – page Xii of executive summary)

Madness.

This is an IG fact-based criticism of the institution of the FBI, not simply a few rogue officials within it.

But wait…. Perspective:

Later it was revealed that Andrew Weissman, Robert Mueller’s #1 special counsel prosecutor, was coordinating investigative efforts with the full support of four AP reporters who were giving Weissman tips. That’s information from journalists to use in his court filings and submitted search warrants. Make sure you grasp this: The AP journalists were feeding information to their ideological allies within the special counsel.

Nuts; simply, well, nuts.

And then there’s Devlin Barrett, Lisa Page and Peter Strzok:

(Source Link – pdf Page #5)

Additionally, Christopher Steele has stated in U.K. court records the person in charge of the Clinton Campaign’s opposition research firm, Glenn Simpson from Fusion GPS, arranged and coordinated for Mr. Steele to talk to several journalists (CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Yahoo News and Mother Jones) while Mr. Steele was also the primary source of information for the FBI investigators (including Strzok and Page):

(Source – page #8)

Make sure you read that full response from Christopher Steele above to see the scope of the media engagements he was conducting.

As more evidence surfaced, the relationship between journalists, Fusion-GPS, Chris Steele and the media’s DOJ/FBI sources blended together. The FBI was using media reports, which were based on Fusion-GPS pitches, to bolster its investigative documents to the FISA court. It is an intelligence laundry operation:

According to the U.K records, Christopher Steele reports this September 2016 meeting with Isikoff was arranged by Glenn Simpson. According to Michael Isikoff on his February podcast, he met Christopher Steele at a Washington, D.C. hotel in Sept. 2016. They were joined by his “old friend” Glenn Simpson, the founder of opposition research firm Fusion GPS, who Isikoff now defines as a “private investigator.”

So Christopher Steele was meeting with journalists, the journalists were writing articles; the FBI was leaking to media and simultaneously citing those same articles as underlying evidence to support their counterintelligence investigations; and all of this was used to validate the investigative documents the FBI was receiving from Christopher Steele; who, along with the leaking FBI officials, was also the source of the media articles.

FUBAR! This is exponentially bonkers.

This is a circle of information, all coming from Glenn Simpson at Fusion GPS, who was the opposition research firm being financed by Hillary Clinton, along with FBI officials who were using their own strategic leaks to validate their own investigation.

Think about the scale of the reporting, and reporting on reporting, and reporting on reporting of reporting, of anonymous leaks, false leaks, lies from “people with knowledge of the matter”, “government officials involved in the matter”, “people familiar with the matter”, “government sources” etc. all going in one unified and semi-coordinated direction – against the aggregate Trump administration.

Now, it actually gets even more convoluted.

Christopher Steele has sworn under oath that he met with multiple journalists (at least eight organizations) in September, mid-October, and late-October 2016: “at Fusion’s instruction“. (pdf page #7)

Overlay upon that sworn admission with what Glenn Simpson (Fusion-GPS) told the House Intelligence Committee while also under oath about his involvement in sharing information derived from Christopher Steele:

(Testimony – pdf link, page #147)

…”without my knowledge and against my wishes”?

Huh?

FBI Director James Comey admits to leaking his ‘memos’ to the New York Times. FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was busted for leaking and lying about it. FBI #2 Counterintelligence Agent Peter Strzok and FBI Attorney Lisa Page are caught in their text messages leaking to Politico, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.

…. AND the FBI is caught, in at least one FISA application, using Yahoo media reports provided by them AND their investigative source Christopher Steele to establish a basis for FISA “Title I” surveillance; the most intrusive and wide-open search and surveillance authority possible.

The Clinton Campaign is paying Fusion GPS to conduct opposition research against Donald Trump. In addition to Glenn Simpson pushing that opposition research into the media, Fusion GPS is also providing that opposition research –including information from contacts with media– directly to the FBI:

(pdf link – page #4)

… In addition to using the Fusion-GPS opposition research to underpin their counterintelligence investigation, the FBI then turn around and leak the same opposition research information to the media to create secondary support for their counterintelligence investigation.

Tell me again how the media can possibly write about this now?

The problem is not just corruption with the U.S. Justice System, the DOJ and the FBI; the problem is corruption within the media.

We’re talking about thousands of hours of media TV pundits, thousands more columns written, and almost every scintilla of it based on originating intelligence sources -from the larger intelligence system- that are now being exposed as duplicitous and conspiratorial in the scale of their malicious intent.

This larger story-line has traveled in one direction. The narrative has only traveled in one direction. Each thread converging on codependent trails for collective stories all going in one direction. One big engineered narrative endlessly pushed. Think about how far the collective media have traveled with this story over the past eighteen months?

Hell, twenty-something-year-old “journalists” were so committed to the resistance narrative they were even sleeping with their sources to get any little engineering angle possible.

Over a period of several years it has become increasingly obvious the collective journey, using all that expended effort, was going in the wrong direction.

The media have fully invested themselves in three-years of narrative distribution in only one direction. Not a single MSM entity has questioned their travel as a result of false leaks or false sources in the totality of time they have covered the DOJ and FBI story.

Nothing within their collective need to will-an-outcome will change the media’s proximity to facts when the truthful story behind the DOJ and FBI corruption is finally exposed. The media are so far away from the place where this story ends, they have no inherent capability to even begin to travel in the opposite direction, toward the truth.

The only way they could align with the truth is to admit that virtually every scintilla of their reportage over the past three years was inherently false, wrong, skewed and manipulated by their “sources” distributing the material for their reporting.

There’s not a single media outlet capable of doing that.

Think about a New York Times, CNN, New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones, Yahoo News or Washington Post journalist now having to write an article deconstructing a foundation of three-years worth of lies they participated in creating.

Do we really think such a catastrophic level of corrupted journalism could reconstitute into genuine reporting of fact-based information?

EVER?

Impossible.