Thread by @DavidNeiwert

Actually, Glenn, every journalist worth his salt assesses the credibility of his interviewees. The fact that you refuse to do so in this case really is more of a reflection of what a crappy poseur of a journalist you have become. A thread. 1/

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1443577139459022854

First of all, the person to whom you are tethering your credibility, @DarrenJBeattie, is not a journalist in any real sense of the word. He is a far-right provocateur/propagandist who posed for years as a kind of alt-right pseudo-intellectual academic. /2

Beattie's best-known appearance prior to his current career was in a bizarre Ben Garrison cartoon, sitting on his giant brain while Jonah Goldberg wipes his shoes.

Many of us agree that Beattie sits on his brain, but not in the way Garrison depicts. /3

Beattie had a job in the Trump administration as a speechwriter for awhile, but was unceremoniously dumped when it emerged he had given a talk to a gathering of white nationalists. /4
cnn.com/2018/08/19/pol…

To this day, Beattie angrily denies that he is a white nationalist. But one of the ways we know he is very much in that camp is that not only do he and white nationalist Nick Fuentes constantly retweet each other, but Beattie extols Fuentes as a "civil rights icon." /5

After his White House stint, Beattie wound up at the far-right propaganda organ Revolver News. Among the more incendiary screeds he has authored there is a front-page rant calling on police to shoot protesters amid last summer's protests. /6

revolver.news/2020/09/only-d…

This was its hair-raising conclusion. But this is what Greenwald and Tucker Carlson call "investigative journalism." /7

Then came Beattie's attacks on journalists who exposed white-nationalist influences within the White House. Tucker Carlson brought him on the show to single out NBC News' @BrandyZadrozny for attack. /8
dailykos.com/stories/2020/1…

But the coup de grace, as it were, was Beattie's reportage in June claiming that the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol might have been a "Deep State" operation conducted by the FBI.
revolver.news/2021/06/federa…

Alex Jones touted similar claims after the insurrection, and then told his audience: "But I’ve been in contact with the great folks over at Revolver News. I’ve been working with them some, giving them my feedback on this for several weeks. / 10

https://twitter.com/ryanmasri_/status/1405199407784595457

But Tucker Carlson leapt on the story and avidly promoted it. He invited Beattie onto the show and covered the story credulously. /11
mediamatters.org/fox-news/tucke…

Carlson even took Beattie's speculations a step further as proof positive of FBI perfidy: /12

There's just one problem with this: As the WaPo's Aaron Blake observes, “Legal experts say the government literally cannot name an undercover agent as an unindicted co-conspirator.” /13

washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/…

“There are many reasons why an indictment would reference unindicted co-conspirators, but their status as FBI agents is not one of them,” Jens David Ohlin, a criminal law professor at Cornell Law School, told Blake. /14

CNN's senior legal analyst Elie Honig agreed: "In fact, prosecutors use those generic labels for a variety of reasons, most commonly to refer to people who participated in the conspiracy but have not yet been publicly charged." /15
cnn.com/2021/06/17/pol…

As Media Matters' @mattgertz observed: /15
mediamatters.org/fox-news/tucke…

Even Carlson’s examples, drawn from Beattie’s execrable reportage, betrayed a fundamental lack of understanding how either complex federal prosecutions featuring cooperating witnesses as well as the federal informant system actually work. /16

But as @emptywheel promptly demonstrated, Carlson’s assumption was dead wrong: Court documents indicate Person Two is almost certainly Caldwell's wife, Sharon Caldwell, who may be cooperating with investigators. /17

https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/1405095445597151233

Greenwald similarly promoted Beattie's risible travesty of journalism on Twitter, claiming “they did vastly better 1/6 reporting than most liberal outlets.” /18

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1405153668043792389

He shortly filed an article on Substack in which he avoided their gross factual errors and acknowledged them, but he dismissed it as “one minor analytical flaw” that was “ultimately irrelevant”. /19 greenwald.substack.com/p/questions-ab…

Of course, YMMV, but as an old journalism hand, I would say that a gross error involving the central thesis of your article not only severely undermines it, but renders it worthless garbage. Beattie's piece grotesquely misrepresented how "unindicted co-conspirators" work. /20

But then, Glenn proceeded to incorporate a few gross factual misunderstandings of his own, notably asking: “Why are low-level protesters being charged with major crimes while the alleged organizers of this riot and the leaders of these groups have not been?” /21

This is simply false. First, major players in the organization of the riot—including Joe Biggs and Ethan Nordean of the Proud Boys, as well as noted white nationalist Tim “Baked Alaska” Gionet—have been arrested and charged. /22
dailykos.com/stories/2021/3…

People are still being arrested and charged, and observers familiar with federal investigations fully expect other shoes to drop. Prosecutors have been circling around the leader of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, for several months now. /23
dailykos.com/stories/2021/3…

But the core of Greenwald's narrative is built around a false characterization of the FBI's relationship with the informants involved in Jan. 6. He writes: /24

We have in fact known for awhile that figures like Biggs and his Proud Boys cohort, national chairman Enrique Tarrio (arrested on Jan. 3 in D.C.), as well as a number of Oath Keepers, acted as informants for the FBI. I reported this out in March. /25
dailykos.com/stories/2021/3…

These informants were not secretly reporting on the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, nor were they manipulating them into doing the FBI's bidding, as Glenn claims. Rather, they were providing intel and inside information on Antifa and BLM. /26
dailykos.com/stories/2021/3…

The cozy relationship that far-right groups enjoyed with law enforcement generally has played a key role in their emboldenment over the past five years, constantly ratcheting up their violence and threatening rhetoric, culminating in Jan. 6. /27
dailykos.com/stories/2021/3…

This is the issue that Greenwald and Beattie's Infowars-based gaslighting about Jan. 6 is intended to obscure. The spread of this narrative through mainstream actors like Carlson is deeply troubling. /28
dailykos.com/stories/2021/6…

Incidentally, one of the reporters who I know has been actually getting out from behind his desk and reporting on these events accurately on the street has been @AndyBCampbell. /29
huffpost.com/entry/proud-bo…

Ask yourself, Glenn: Which would you rather trust: A white-nationalist propagandist who can't get basic facts straight, or a steady-eyed reporter who has been out gathering facts in real time?

The fact that you prefer the former tells us all about how you practice journalism./30

@threadreaderapp please #unroll