BREAKING NEWS: A federal judge has confirmed that the plot to imprison Michael Cohen during the pandemic to keep him from publishing a tell-all book about the president before the 2020 election was just what we thought it was. The odds of the book's publication just skyrocketed.
PS/ Understand what this means: Barr blatantly—and in a way cognizable to a federal judge—tried to use the federal government's power to imprison Americans to protect Donald Trump's re-election odds. This is yet another political, legal, and moral scandal for both Trump and Barr.
PS2/ It also corroborates the claim that Barr's edict that DOJ can't investigate any element of Trump's campaign—an edict ostensibly covering Biden's campaign too, except that in announcing it *Barr said he welcomed all evidence on Biden from Giuliani*—was a naked political ploy.
PS3/ It also—far less importantly—underscores that major media had this story wrong. While national outlets were still saying that DOJ put Cohen back in prison because he had dinner a block from his home while on house arrest, feeds like this one were saying it was the book deal.
PS4/ I say this only because it means media hasn't yet accepted that DOJ has been thoroughly corrupted by William Barr—so it continues to use DOJ officials as sources when it should not, in the same way it continues using Trump White House officials as sources when it should not.
PS5/ One of the benefits of news analysis on Twitter—against many obvious drawbacks—is that analysts, unlike reporters, don't have to develop sources, which also means we don't have to trust *obviously untrustworthy DOJ sources* just to maintain an ongoing relationship with them.
PS5/ It wasn't the Cohen camp that lied to media on why Cohen was returned to prison. It wasn't the courts that lied to media on why Cohen was returned to prison. It wasn't Twitter users who lied to media on why Cohen was returned to prison.
It was media's "trusted" DOJ sources.
It was media's "trusted" DOJ sources.
PS6/ I've been waiting this whole presidency for major media outlets to declare that they will require not just triple-sourcing but something more than that if the scoop comes from the White House or the DOJ. Instead, they chose to keep filing stories that turned out to be false.
