A curious incuriousity
There isn’t a real journalist in the universe — not a beat reporter or opinion writer or copy editor — who wouldn’t want to read an informant’s account of a sitting president taking a bribe. You can debunk it. You can prove it. But you want to see it. But therein lies the problem. There aren’t many journalists left.
Take Philip Bump, who contends that “James Comer’s bribery allegations are out on a very shaky limb,” even though Comer has never once made any bribery allegations. The House investigation is focused on the “decision-making process” that followed the informant’s accusation.
Last week, CNN ran a piece that might well have been sent verbatim from the FBI press shop. CNN’s “sources” claimed that “the form in question has origins in a tranche of documents that Rudy Giuliani provided to the Justice Department in 2020” and the investigation led nowhere. A big nothingburger.
It’s this CNN story, and another version in The Washington Post (almost surely from the same sources), that allowed Jamie Raskin, ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, to claim that “Rudy Giuliani surfaced these allegations,” and that a “team” had looked at the document and “in August determined that there was no grounds to escalate from an initial assessment to a preliminary investigation.”
None of that, apparently, is true. As my colleagues Margot Cleveland and Mollie Hemingway report, former Attorney General William Barr told The Federalist that the investigation had never been closed, it had merely been sent to an office in Delaware. And the document did not emanate from Giuliani — the same ploy used to undercut the New York Post’s reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop story — but from a 2017 whistleblower report that showed up in a 2020 search. No one has come forward to accuse Barr of lying, so I assume the above is true.
Who knows what this is all about? I’ve learned not to make too many assumptions. For all I know, this all leads to a rickety accusation and a dead end.
Oh, I think we all already know perfectly well what it’s all about, David. Fact is, you could count the number of real American journalists still extant on the fingers of one hand, with a pinky and a thumb left over. The Praetorian Media’s total lack of interest in the Biden Crime Family’s endemic corruption isn’t in the least perplexing, once you’ve acknowledged who and what they are at bottom.
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