Thread by @MattWolking

"news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is headed home without issuing new charges is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media."

A must-read dissection by @mtaibbi taibbi.substack.com/p/russiagate-i…

"in a brutal irony everyone should have seen coming, the press has now handed Trump the mother of campaign issues heading into 2020. Nothing Trump is accused of from now on by the press will be believed by huge chunks of the population"

"Imagine how tone-deaf you’d have to be to not realize it makes you look bad, when news does not match audience expectations you raised. To be unaware of this is mind-boggling, the journalistic equivalent of walking outside without pants."

"For years, every pundit and Democratic pol in Washington hyped every new Russia headline like the Watergate break-in. ... The story hyped from the start was espionage: a secret relationship between the Trump campaign and Russian spooks who’d helped him win the election."

"It was literal spying, treason, & election-fixing – crimes so severe, former NSA employee John Schindler told reporters, Trump 'will die in jail.' … Hillary Clinton insisted Russians 'could not have known how to weaponize' political ads unless they’d been 'guided' by Americans"

"Either Trump is a compromised foreign agent, or he isn’t. If he isn’t, news outlets once again swallowed a massive disinformation campaign, only this error is many orders of magnitude more stupid than any in the recent past, WMD included."

The media "broke every written and unwritten rule in pursuit of this story, starting with the prohibition on reporting things we can’t confirm."

Comey briefed Trump on the dossier on 1/6/2017. "Within 4 days, basically the entire Washington news media somehow knew all about this top-secret meeting & had the very hook they needed to go public. Nobody in the mainstream press thought this was weird or warranted comment."

"The sequence of events in that second week of January, 2017 will now need to be heavily re-examined. We now know, from his own testimony, that former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper had some kind of role"

"Why would real security officials litigate this grave matter through the media? Why were the world’s most powerful investigative agencies acting like they were trying to move a stock, pushing a private, unverified report that even Buzzfeed could see had factual issues?"

"even the most cursory review showed the [dossier] had issues .... This made it more amazing that the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, @AdamSchiff, held hearings on March 20, 2017 that blithely read out Steele report details as if they were fact."

"The Steele report was the Magna Carta of #Russiagate. It provided the implied context for thousands of news stories to come, yet no journalist was ever able to confirm its most salacious allegations"

"For years, every hint the dossier might be true became a banner headline, while every time doubt was cast on Steele’s revelations, the press was quiet. ... This was heads-I-win, tails-you-lose reporting."

"This has been a consistent pattern throughout #Russiagate. Step one: salacious headline. Step two, days or weeks later: news emerges the story is shakier than first believed. Step 3 (in the best case) involves the story being walked back or retracted by the same publication."

"That’s been rare. More often, when explosive #Russiagate headlines go sideways, the original outlets simply ignore the new development, leaving the 'retraction' process to conservative outlets that don’t reach the original audiences."

"Early on, I was so amazed by the sheer quantity of Russia 'bombshells' being walked back, I started to keep a list. It’s well above 50 stories now. ... if the mistakes were random, you’d expect them in both directions, but Russiagate errors uniformly go the same way."