The left's leaking scam

Mark Hemingway:

The latest example of mistaking leaks for journalism comes from The New York Times. Last Thursday, the Times reported that “Lawmakers Are Warned That Russia Is Meddling to Re-elect Trump.” This report prompted John Brennan, former CIA head and charter member of the anti-Trump resistance, to declare, “We are now in a full-blown national security crisis. By trying to prevent the flow of intelligence to Congress, Trump is abetting a Russian covert operation to keep him in office for Moscow’s interests, not America’s.”

Brennan’s overheated warning proved to be premature. By Sunday, the Times was walking back its initial reporting in a second report, “Dueling Narratives Emerge From Muddied Account of Russia’s 2020 Interference.” Contrary to its first story, the Times was reporting that intelligence officials “now maintain that the House members either misheard or misinterpreted a key part of the briefing, and that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not mean to say that it believes the Russians are currently intervening in the election explicitly to help President Trump.”

It doesn’t help that the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, has been caught, among other things, telling bald-faced lies on national television, deliberately mischaracterizing evidence in Trump’s impeachment trial, and leaking in an embarrassingly erroneous fashion that Donald Trump Jr. was working with Russians to hack Democratic Party emails.

Byron York has subsequently reported that it was Schiff who organized the intel briefing in the first place, and as soon as it was over “Republicans agreed that the news would leak soon.”

Of course, this is all just informed speculation about how the Times got burned, because, again, the sources are all anonymous.

On Friday, the morning after the Times’ first story appeared saying Russians were meddling to elect Trump, CNN’s Jake Tapper went public with information contradicting the Times’ story. “A national security official I know and trust pushes back on the way the briefing/ODNI story is being told, and others with firsthand knowledge agree with his assessment,” he tweeted.

According to Tapper’s source, “A more reasonable interpretation of the intelligence is not that [the Russians] have a preference [in the 2020 presidential election], it's a step short of that. It's more that they understand the President is someone they can work with, he's a dealmaker.” By Monday, Tapper and two other CNN reporters had filed a more complete report contradicting the Times: “US intelligence briefer appears to have overstated assessment of 2020 Russian interference.”

So good for Jake Tapper, whose anonymous sources seem to have effectively disputed the Times’ anonymous sources, which got the news-consuming public one step closer to the truth. And it may be a form of penance since Tapper and his colleagues at CNN played a large role in uncritically accepting the leaks that led to over three years of Russian collusion hysteria.
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The bogus leaks all seem to go in the same direction.  From the Russian collusion hoax to this latest iteration they appear to be misleading stories by the left used to attack the President.   The media seems to be exceptionally careless about its own reputation as long as a story is an attack on
Trump.

It looks like the Democrats lied to the media about the briefing.  With Adam Schiff's track record, he is a suspect in the leak.