Media critic hits liberal cable for embracing the Russian collusion hoax, but not his own paper

Ed Morrissey:

Plenty of people need to answer for their embrace of the Steele dossier — the FBI, James Comey, Adam Schiff, Christopher Steele himself. A number of media outlets need to provide accountability, especially Buzzfeed for its inexplicable decision to publish what turned out to be a salacious package mostly consisting of rumor as misinformation. But when it comes to the worst offender, Erik Wemple declared yesterday, no one surpasses MSNBC’s biggest prime-time host.
EE ALSO: Durham investigation focusing attention on John Brennan and some CIA veterans aren’t pleased

“Name a host on cable news who has dug more deeply into Trump-Russia than MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow,” Wemple writes. And no one got it more wrong, either — and no one ran as fast from it when it fell apart. “She was there for the bunkings, absent for the debunkings,” Wemple concludes, “a pattern of misleading and dishonest asymmetry.”

It began with the Buzzfeed publication of the dossier, fueled by the absence-of-evidence fallacy:

Sorting through the silence from the FBI and the unverified claims in the dossier, Maddow riffed on her Jan. 13, 2017, program: “I mean, had the FBI looked into what was in that dossier and found that it was all patently false, they could tell us that now, right?” said Maddow. “I mean, the dossier has now been publicly released. If the FBI looked into it and they found it was all trash, there’s no reason they can’t tell us that now. They’re not telling us that now. They’re not saying that. They’re not saying anything.”

That line of analysis has gained some important context via the Horowitz report. The FBI did, in fact, find “potentially serious problems” with Steele’s reporting as early as January 2017. A source review in March 2017 “did not make any findings that would have altered that judgment.”

So why didn’t the FBI admit that publicly, as Maddow apparently expected? For one thing, the agents running Operation Crossfire Hurricane hadn’t told the FISA court (FISC) that their prime evidence for the warrant on Carter Page had major holes in it. They didn’t want people to know it was already getting debunked. Instead, the FBI or maybe Congress leaked info to CNN about the warrant as a means to bolster their public case about Russian penetration of Team Trump, and Maddow pounced, so to speak:

On May 3, 2017, Maddow cited a CNN report that “parts of this dossier passed muster even in federal court when the dossier was used in part to justify a secret FISA court warrant for U.S. surveillance on a Trump campaign adviser.” Thanks to Horowitz, we now know that officials misused the dossier in this process, failing to disclose to the FISA court dossier-debunking information. Never place blind faith in the FBI!

“The Republican claim today was that the dossier has been increasingly discredited. That’s not true in terms of the public record about the dossier. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. As time goes on, more and more pieces do get independently corroborated,” Maddow said.

As it turns out, the Republicans were correct, and it was Maddow was spinning conspiracy theories — with the help of the FBI and/or Congress. The timing of this leak is interesting, too. Six days after this leak about the FISA warrant and the dossier, Donald Trump fired FBI director James Comey, primarily for not doing precisely what Maddow expected — going public to debunk the conspiracy theory. When that happened, Comey then engineered his own leaks from the investigation in order to force the appointment of a special counsel, leading to two years of hyperbole and hysteria over what turned out to be … nothing much at all.
...

The FBI did not tell the truth because it did not want to admit it had lied to the FI Court.  The media also had little incentive to correct the record because they wanted the lies to be true so they could win prizes for toppling a President.  If Wemple has made similar comments about his own paper's role in this travesty, I missed it. 

The Washington Post and the NY Times both were using FBI sources to write the Russian collusion narrative and some of them are still pushing this false story as an excuse to impeach Trump.  The media as a whole has been shameful in its treatment of the President and his campaign.   The writers at the Post have defended their false narrative about Trump even after the IG report exposed the lies they had previously published.