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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   31364 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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Eli Lake at Bari Weiss' The Free Press

He lays out in simple, clear language how the FBI has held double and triple standards when it comes to investigating or protecting powerful political figures. I believe this piece is downstream of more original reporting from the likes of Taibbi, Shellenberger, etc, ultimately stemming from Elon Musk's release of The Twitter Files.

You’ll recall that those scoops weren’t as big a news story as was the fact that Facebook and Twitter banned users from sharing the story on the theory that it was the fruit of Kremlin fakery intended to sway the presidential election. It turns out that the FBI officials who warned social media companies that the laptop story might be part of a Russian scheme to mislead voters themselves knew that the laptop was real. And they knew so as early as December of 2019.

But instead of clarifying that the FBI had verified its contents, the bureau instead allowed a falsehood about its provenance to linger. Savor the irony. In an effort to counter Russian disinformation, the FBI actively allowed American disinformation to spread.

It’s also Russiagate—Trump’s alleged (and never proven) collusion with Russia—which was fueled by a Democrat-funded opposition research sheet known as the Steele Dossier. The FBI knew by early 2017 (at the latest) that the whole thing was junk. But like the Russian disinformation lie about the laptop, the bureau let the dossier falsehood linger while the Steele Dossier was hyped like Watergate by the legacy press and Democratic Party in 2017 and 2018.

Then there is the double standard the bureau applied to pursuing foreign influence investigations into Trump’s campaign and the campaign of Hillary Clinton. That was one of the primary conclusions of a report released in May from U.S. Special Counsel John Durham. For Trump, the FBI opened a full investigation on the thinnest of pretexts. For Clinton, the bureau delayed investigations into potential foreign influence and offered defensive briefings to her lawyers.

Here it is useful to examine the other major event of last week: the serious allegations raised by two career IRS investigators who led the team probing Hunter’s tax violations. On Wednesday the two agents, Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, testified in open session before the House Oversight Committee.

Ziegler and Shapley painted a picture of a long-standing probe that began in 2018 into Hunter Biden’s income that was stymied and delayed at nearly every turn. The delays were significant—so significant that eventually the statute of limitations ran out. Ziegler said that the probe did not follow normal procedures. Prosecutors, he said, “slow-walked the investigation, and put in place unnecessary approvals and road blocks from effectively and efficiently addressing the case. A lot of times, we were not able to follow the facts.” Ziegler and Shapley also said there were times when prosecutors informed Hunter’s lawyers about investigative steps, such as a search warrant.

All of that would be bad enough. But the event that led Ziegler and Shapley to eventually blow the whistle was when, in October of last year, the U.S. attorney in charge of the case, David Weiss, privately told them that it was not his decision to charge Hunter in districts outside of Delaware. That directly contradicted the pledge that Attorney General Merrick Garland made to Congress that there would be no restrictions placed on Weiss in his investigation of Hunter.

These feel like bombshell revelations to me, but there is also a sickening feeling of two movies on one screen. This stuff is worthy of coverage in global mainstream media, right? Not just "bloggers on substack"?

I don't have a NYT or WaPo subscription. In the last five years, I have completely lost faith in mainstream media. Is this FBI stuff getting the coverage it deserves? Shouldn't something like this make a career for a scrappy Berenson type at the NYT? Are they salivating or putting their (and our) heads in the sand?

The New York Times, Washington Post, and the FBI are all on the same side here. They're not going to publicize this stuff. And if they don't publicize it, it doesn't matter.

And if they don't publicize it, it doesn't matter.

Why not?

Because it does not enter the public conversation and word of it doesn't spread outside online dissident spaces. When ideas acquire the reputation of being popular among The Bad People, the good people hesitate to bring those ideas up and discuss them until they don't have a choice anymore. The power of the media to make people believe incorrect things is fairly substantial, but their ability to define the bounds of conversation is even more powerful.

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