Thread by @JewhadiTM

How news media omissions distort Russia probe narrative ... and shield Democrats thehill.com/opinion/white-…

Counterintelligence investigations are by their very nature complex, nuanced and methodically slow, all facts that today’s news media outlets seem to ignore as they chronicle the Russia collusion probe.

The past week provided fresh examples of how journalists endlessly seeking to portray the Russia probe in black-and-white terms can misinform the public through omission, cherry-picking or lack of context.

On Wednesday, for example, CNN and others ran speculative reports suggesting Russians or Republicans could be involved in a mysterious grand jury subpoena fight involving special counsel Robert Mueller.

The inference was drawn because Alston & Bird was believed to one of the law firms involved in the closed-door litigation. To bolster their case, the media outlets noted the firm had represented Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska (back in 2003) and some conservative clients since.

What the media omitted, however, was that the same firm also represented (in 2017-18) Orbis Business Intelligence and Christopher Steele, was essential to the origins of the Russia collusion probe.

If a reporter is going to cherry-pick old clients in a story about Mueller, Steele is just as big a name as any Russian. Yet, zero mention.

Here’s another one. The New York Times — which considers itself a bastion of journalism but whose work of late was questioned by its former editor — wrote a story this week on the federal obstruction-of-justice indictment of Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.

The Times connected the indictment’s information about Veselnitskaya’s ties to the Kremlin and her role in a now infamous June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with the president’s son, Donald Jr., and then-Trump presidential campaign manager Paul Manafort.

What the Times omitted, however, was that Veselnitskaya also was working at the same time with Glenn Simpson and Fusion GPS, the opposition-research firm that hired Steele to produce his dossier on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

If Veselnitskaya’s ties to the Kremlin were important to mention for her Trump meeting, then why wouldn’t they be just as important to the guys who helped create the dossier that spurred the Russia probe?

And there’s more paradigm-changing facts excluded from the Times story. Veselnitskaya managed to get into the U.S. because the Obama administration originally gave her a special parole visa.

Hmmm. The lawyer who sets up the Trump Tower meeting gets her original entry to the United States based on a special act by the Obama Justice Department. Seems relevant but, once again, absent from the story.

Then there’s the media’s reporting of the secret court filing made by Manafort’s lawyers. It turned out not to be so secret because its redactions were made public by a technical glitch.

Countless news organizations concentrated on the fact that Mueller believes Manafort shared Trump campaign polling data with a man in his firm named Konstantin Kilimnik, whom prosecutors claim is tied to Russian intelligence.

But omitted from those stories was the fact that U.S. intelligence first learned of Kilimnik’s ties to Russia intelligence more than a decade ago and warned then-Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in 2005 as he prepared to run for president and was involved in a group that hired Kilimnik

Here’s why that omission is relevant: If US intel knew long ago of Kilimnik’s ties to Russia, and the George W. Bush intel apparatus warned a presidential contender in 2005, why didn’t the Obama intel community do so when Kilimnik’s colleague, Manafort, joined the Trump campaign?

Unfortunately, readers didn’t get to ask that question because they were kept in the dark.