US media froths over red herring as real story ignored

After the Mueller report. Keep in mind the story that isn’t being told: the FBI’s mucking around in the 2016 election.

US Attorney-General William Barr arrives at his home in McLean, Virginia, yesterday as he weighs how much of the Mueller inquiry will be disclosed. Picture: AP

While Washington sizzles over news that the Mueller report is now in the hands of Attorney-General William Barr, it pays to ­remember the other big intrigue from the 2016 election. You won’t hear me arguing it was ever ­realistic that Hillary Clinton might be charged for email-related crimes. It was even less likely when her opponent became Donald Trump. Still, the inner workings of the project of finessing Clinton’s email vulnerability should be ­especially resonant now.

The man who deliberately sought the Mueller investigation, then FBI director James Comey, was key to that finessing and also had every reason to want to change the subject from his own role in the 2016 race. And we know that the same small circle of FBI headquarters personnel who worked on the Clinton investigation also gave birth to the Trump investigation that would be handed over to special counsel Robert Mueller.

So what have we learned that’s new? In just the past few weeks, the release of a congressional interview with FBI lawyer Lisa Page ­revealed two ways the FBI tried unsuccessfully to resist attempts by the Obama administration to ­influence its questioning of Clinton.

We also know, thanks to a combination of press reporting and public disclosure, that Comey himself possessed what appeared to be direct evidence, from a Russian source, of a scheme to fix the Clinton investigation involving Obama attorney-general Loretta Lynch. What also seems clear from the public record, including the public report of the Justice ­Department’s own inspector-general, is that the FBI had little interest in finding out if the information was true, false or a Russian plant.

Instead Comey, as he told us himself, seized on it as a justification for his protocol-busting ­intrusion into the Clinton case to convince the American people that the investigation was not fixed.

Robert Muller arrives at work in Washington last week. Picture: AP

His first intervention led to his second intervention, in some ways the weirdest, in which Comey reopened the Clinton case just before election day, believing Clinton was certain to win. Now pollsters tell us this action may have inadvertently tilted the race to Trump.

The press is not interested in this story, thanks in no small part to the Mueller-Russia distraction.

The Mueller report itself is not likely to say anything about any of this, though it represents the most consequential if indirect way ­Russian intelligence activities influenced the election.

The Justice Department’s own inspector-general, Michael Horowitz, author of a secret report on these matters, told congress that it was not his decision to classify the information at “such a high level”. “We very much want the committee to see this information,” he testified. His comment has gone virtually unreported in the US media.

This is not the place to trace how the Steele dossier begat the Mueller investigation, but it clearly did, as well as the previous FBI “counter-intelligence” investigation of the Trump campaign, which Mueller inherited.

Because the dossier spells the names of some of Trump’s associates correctly, to this day some in the press insist on writing that “many of the allegations in the Steele dossier have been corroborated”. They haven’t been. The dossier remains one of the biggest red herrings in American history, a thing that had no provenance that the US press should have respected. Whether by accident or design, it has occluded this more important story.

The US media continues to ­obsess over a document any nine-year-old with Google and an inkjet printer could have created. Yet the press has no interest in a secret government report that details how a piece of dubious Russian ­intelligence was used by the FBI to meddle ineptly in a US presidential election.

At this late hour, reporters even now cling to the hope that Mueller will validate the improbable Steele allegations.

Our language casually refers to the “news media”, but many in the media wouldn’t know news if it bit them in the rear end. That’s not their job. To them, the “story” is whatever the social animals in their milieu say it is, even if it rests on something as fundamentally flimsy and anonymous as the Steele dossier (notice even its putative author has no interest in making the rounds to defend his work).

I am not alleging partisan bias here, partly because portraying Trump’s victory as a fluke occasioned by the actions of Comey fits neither side’s preferred narrative. I am alleging a media groupthink that has many reporters falling-down drunk with credulity for the Steele allegations even as the real story passes them by.

Let’s hope once the Mueller red herring has been reeled in, the press will start doing its job again and get to the bottom of the FBI’s deranged actions in the 2016 race.

The Wall Street Journal