CNN Newsroom anchor Jim Acosta, famed for being the WWE version of a media tough guy during the Trump years, curled up like a kitten last weekend when interviewing Phil Mudd, onetime head of the FBI’s National Security Branch. Also a former CIA man, Mudd is now an Acosta colleague, a “senior intelligence analyst” on the CNN payroll.
“You know, there are real consequences,” said Acosta, “when people go out and trash the integrity of the FBI…”
It was less question than invitation, and Mudd jumped at it. The FBI man seethed that even if you’re upset about the raid of Donald Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago, if you think state police can deal with the Iranians, the Russians, the Chinese, white collar crime, mortgage fraud and cyber-porn involving kids, you suck.
“If you say defund the FBI,” he went on, “let your kid be abused by an adult!”
“Yeah,” said Acosta. “It doesn’t add up.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBDZqwjobnQ
Mudd — who’s supposed to be both retired from law enforcement and a member of the media now — then went on about how difficult things are for FBI agents now that the unredacted warrant was out, releasing names and robbing agents of their birthright anonymity just as “our kids are going back to school.”
“Yeah…” said Acosta again. “They want to intimidate people in law enforcement.”
As they spoke, CNN flashed a graphic of mean things people said online about the FBI last week, like “kill all feds.” Acosta noted, as if spontaneously, that this reminded him of the atmosphere before January 6th (I thought of the “kill all cops” memes, but what do I know?) before asking Mudd if he was worried about another “spasm” of “domestic terrorism. Mudd said yes, America is filled with extremists like the ones “abroad,” and “I think we’re going to see a catastrophic event” like January 6th.
Watching, I found myself wondering, “What is this?” There was no pretense of separateness between the CNN employees, and the spot’s purpose appeared to be to let a senior CIA/FBI counterintelligence official whine about the reaction to the Trump raid, stoke fear, and compare Americans to al-Qaeda. It felt less like news than something out of a dystopian novel like Fahrenheit 451 or We, and this is essentially on air round the clock. Dollars to doughnuts, if you turn on cable right now, you will find, somewhere, a former intelligence official yammering at you through your telescreen.
We’re a week into one of the biggest stories of our time, and the feds and media have spent most every minute acting as an unembarrassed unified front. One after another, national security “analysts” lined up to give breathless, hyperbolic, and and eerily synchronized commentary about the Mar-a-Lago raid. If the message on day 1 was about how they “must have” probable cause of a crime, that was the word up and down the dial. If by the weekend it was “I’ve never seen this level of threat,” you heard that in more or less the same words from the likes of Mudd, McCabe, and others on multiple channels. What’s the public supposed to see, other than an American analog to China Central TV or Rossiya-1, when they tuned in to all this?
And they told two friends, and so on, and so on…
CNN Newsroom anchor Jim Acosta, famed for being the WWE version of a media tough guy during the Trump years, curled up like a kitten last weekend when interviewing Phil Mudd, onetime head of the FBI’s National Security Branch. Also a former CIA man, Mudd is now an Acosta colleague, a “senior intelligence analyst” on the CNN payroll.
“You know, there are real consequences,” said Acosta, “when people go out and trash the integrity of the FBI…”
It was less question than invitation, and Mudd jumped at it. The FBI man seethed that even if you’re upset about the raid of Donald Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago, if you think state police can deal with the Iranians, the Russians, the Chinese, white collar crime, mortgage fraud and cyber-porn involving kids, you suck.
“If you say defund the FBI,” he went on, “let your kid be abused by an adult!”
“Yeah,” said Acosta. “It doesn’t add up.”
Mudd — who’s supposed to be both retired from law enforcement and a member of the media now — then went on about how difficult things are for FBI agents now that the unredacted warrant was out, releasing names and robbing agents of their birthright anonymity just as “our kids are going back to school.”
“Yeah…” said Acosta again. “They want to intimidate people in law enforcement.”
As they spoke, CNN flashed a graphic of mean things people said online about the FBI last week, like “kill all feds.” Acosta noted, as if spontaneously, that this reminded him of the atmosphere before January 6th (I thought of the “kill all cops” memes, but what do I know?) before asking Mudd if he was worried about another “spasm” of “domestic terrorism. Mudd said yes, America is filled with extremists like the ones “abroad,” and “I think we’re going to see a catastrophic event” like January 6th.
Watching, I found myself wondering, “What is this?” There was no pretense of separateness between the CNN employees, and the spot’s purpose appeared to be to let a senior CIA/FBI counterintelligence official whine about the reaction to the Trump raid, stoke fear, and compare Americans to al-Qaeda. It felt less like news than something out of a dystopian novel like Fahrenheit 451 or We, and this is essentially on air round the clock. Dollars to doughnuts, if you turn on cable right now, you will find, somewhere, a former intelligence official yammering at you through your telescreen.
We’re a week into one of the biggest stories of our time, and the feds and media have spent most every minute acting as an unembarrassed unified front. One after another, national security “analysts” lined up to give breathless, hyperbolic, and and eerily synchronized commentary about the Mar-a-Lago raid. If the message on day 1 was about how they “must have” probable cause of a crime, that was the word up and down the dial. If by the weekend it was “I’ve never seen this level of threat,” you heard that in more or less the same words from the likes of Mudd, McCabe, and others on multiple channels. What’s the public supposed to see, other than an American analog to China Central TV or Rossiya-1, when they tuned in to all this?
The timeline of leaked explanations of the raid is mind-boggling. Anonymous officials started by telling us the case was linked to Trump having “delayed returning 15 boxes of material requested by… the National Archives,” then it was “classified documents relating to nuclear weapons,” then it was fear Trump could reveal “sources and methods,” then it was possible Espionage Act violations. By Saturday, former “national security prosecutor” Barb McQuade went on MSNBC to explain the “brilliant tactical move” of using the Espionage Act, since it doesn’t “require the documents to be classified” (we’d been told all week this was about classified material). The next day, CBS published news of a joint FBI/DHS bulletin warning of “armed rebellion,” “civil war,” and a “dirty bomb attack,” and the day after that, we were told FBI “filter agents” did, then didn’t seize, then did again seize Donald Trump’s passports, but returned them in the end.
Throughout, NatSec goons flooded airwaves and pages of papers like the Washington Post and New York Times to cheerlead, from Asha Rangappa to Clint Watts to Frank Figliuzzi to Tracy Walder to hilariously named Jennifer Coffindaffer to Chuck Rosenberg to Mudd to Richard Frankel to an endless quantity of unnamed “people familiar with the matter.” Included also: a long list of Trump-Russia investigation vets, many on media payrolls despite public records of malfeasance and lying.
The most amazing cases involve Andrew McCabe, James Clapper, and Peter Strzok, with the latter’s story particularly nuts. The former deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division went on with MSNBC news-gelding Joe Scarborough to reassure Americans they should “absolutely… trust what the FBI is doing” because “it’s not that the FBI is targeting any one side or the other.” This, from a guy who headed the Trump-Russia “Crossfire Hurricane” probe and achieved fame via salacious texts with his lover (and now-MSNBC analyst) Lisa Page. In 2015 he wrote, “I just saw my first Bernie Sander [SIC] bumper sticker. Made me want to key the car… He’s an durian like Trump...” In response to Page’s worried refrain that Trump might become president, Strzok answered, “No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.”
These and other texts (there are a ton more) inspired Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz to testify, “We were deeply troubled by text messages… that potentially indicated… bias or improper considerations,” adding his behavior was “antithetical to the core values of the FBI.” That’s not Tucker Carlson speaking, but Michael Horowitz, someone Rush Limbaugh called a “deep stater.”
Yet here’s Scarborough yukking it up with Strzok, soliciting his opinion on the even-handedness of the FBI from a guy described by Horowitz as not only having a “biased state of mind,” but being willing to “take official action to impact the presidential candidate’s electoral prospects.” Watch Scarborough scoff at the start at people who say, “We can’t trust anything the FBI does, and look what Peter Strzok did, look what happened with… uh… just all the stuff. I can’t even remember.”
Look what happened… with all the stuff. Priceless:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9T3388F86vs
Meanwhile, former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe repeatedly appeared on CNN, where he’s been a paid contributor since 2019. McCabe said the raid is “something that would have been planned out and re-evaluated and legally examined from every possible angle” and FBI agents would have needed to convince a judge of “probable cause to believe… that a federal crime has been committed.”
McCabe was fired in March of 2018 after the same IG Horowitz concluded he lied in connection with a 2016 leak to the Wall Street Journal. The essence of the case was McCabe putting out a story to rebut allegations of favoritism. An October 23, 2016 Wall Street Journal article reported that the political action committee of longtime Bill and Hillary Clinton confidant and Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe gave $467,000 to the state senate campaign of McCabe’s wife, Jill, at a time when McCabe ran the Washington field office of the FBI, which the WSJ said “provided personnel and resources to the Clinton email probe.”
Horowitz found McCabe “lacked candor” on four occasions, in interviews under oath, and that was just the beginning. A later IG report found McCabe “concurred” with the use of the infamous Steele dossier to obtain a secret FISA warrant against ex-Trump aide Carter Page, and pressed for Steele material to be included in an Intelligence Community Assessment as evidence that Russians sought to “denigrate former Secretary of State [Hillary] Clinton.” McCabe also approved the pre-election use of an FBI agent posing as part of a team briefing then-candidate Trump on foreign threats, in order to snoop on his aide Michael Flynn, and overruled recommendations that Strzok be removed from the Trump-Russia investigation, among other issues.
McCabe, in other words, not only has a history of lying, but a specific history of misconduct involving improperly obtained warrants in Trump-related investigations. Paying him to go on air and offer “analysis” of an FBI warrant on Trump is an expression of total journalistic surrender on the part of CNN. They should be ashamed, but obviously aren’t, since they also employ another liar-under-oath, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who went on CNN’s “Newsroom” last Saturday to offer another master class in Trump-era journalism. Clapper shoved off hard from the pier of fact before inviting audiences to dream nightmare scenarios.
“You find yourself almost hoping it was carelessness, and there wasn’t some more nefarious explanation,” Clapper said. “Was there for example, and I’m going to go out on a limb, some prospect for some kind of sweetheart deal with Putin…? The imagination can run wild...”
Yes it can! Clapper was one of four intelligence officials who presented Trump with the Steele material in early 2017, an act soon after leaked (to his future employer CNN, by the way) in a way that fired a starting gun on years of “pee tape” speculations. Democratic Senators were calling for his indictment on perjury charges as recently as November, 2016. This was after Clapper answered “No, sir” and “not wittingly” in Congress, in response to Edward Snowden-inspired questions about whether or not the NSA had a mass surveillance program. Democrat Ron Wyden described Clapper as having presided over a “deception spree regarding mass surveillance.”
Hey, if you don’t make room in media for someone who’s lied to Congress, that’s just letting cancel culture win. What does having wall-to-wall spooks appearing as paid media personnel on primetime TV slots all week accomplish? There’s a hint in a Political Insider headline from the weekend:
Mar-a-Lago raid gave Trump a 10-point boost over DeSantis with Republican primary voters, poll shows
The Morning Consult/Politico poll showed what everyone in American politics now knows: the raid on Trump’s home increased his chances of being the next Republican nominee. Trump’s numbers went up, and those for Florida’s Ron DeSantis went down, a phenomenon I predicted two weeks ago. A clear double-whammy: Trump gains from being a target of a hated political establishment, while DeSantis does nothing different and loses anyway, thanks to positive attention thrown his way by same.
The intelligence world’s influence on the news was powerful when it was at least partially hidden. During this Trump raid fiasco, the disappearance of lines between the FBI and, say, CNN or NBC finally became so obvious that the state robbed itself of any chance at a propaganda effect. TV has become a bad joke, the deep state version of a Señor Wences act, and no matter what happens with Trump, its reputation is not likely to recover.