I am starting to think CNN operates under a different definition of “reliable.”
CNN’s chief media correspondent, Brian Stelter, hosted CNN’s chief national security correspondent Jim Sciutto this weekend to praise Sciutto’s disputed Russia “scoop,” which alleges the U.S. government “extracted [a] top spy from inside Russia in 2017.”
Good news, guys: CNN says CNN’s reporting is solid. Also, according to Stelter, anyone who claims otherwise of Sciutto’s Russia report is a pro-Trump operative.
“Many pro-Trump outlets, commentators tried to tear down that reporting and say, ‘it might not be true,’” said Stelter, whose show is ironically titled Reliable Sources. “Do you stand by that reporting now, about a week later?”
“One-hundred percent,” said Sciutto, explaining further that stories about covert operations are generally really “difficult” to report.
“And that’s the reality of these situations,” the host of CNN’s Reliable Sources agreed. “Different news outlets make different choices about how much to share and how much not to share.”
Sciutto agreed with Stelter’s assessment that his work was basically flawless, adding further that conservative media believe incorrectly that reporters are “spoon-fed” their stories.
I should pause here to note that neither the host nor his guest has made any mention of the fact that the Washington Post and the New York Times’ reporting on the alleged 2017 exfiltration incident explicitly contradict Scuitto’s version of events.
Sciutto reported specifically that the decision to remove the informant was driven “in part, by concerns that President Donald Trump and his administration repeatedly mishandled classified intelligence and could contribute to exposing the covert source as a spy.” CNN’s reporting stresses the extraction took place in 2017 shortly after the president “discussed highly classified intelligence with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and then-Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak. The intelligence, concerning ISIS in Syria, had been provided by Israel.”
Sciutto alleges further that “the removal happened at a time of wide concern in the intelligence community about mishandling of intelligence by Trump and his administration.” The CNN report clearly suggests that Trump’s 2017 meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak was the catalyst for the removal of the high-level CIA asset.
But the Times alleges the CIA’s efforts to extract the informant date back to 2016. Trump was not even president until 2017. The Times claims also that the American press, not the Trump administration, was responsible for compromising the informant’s cover.
C.I.A. officials worried about safety made the arduous decision in late 2016 to offer to extract the source from Russia. The situation grew more tense when the informant at first refused, citing family concerns — prompting consternation at C.I.A. headquarters and sowing doubts among some American counterintelligence officials about the informant’s trustworthiness. But the C.I.A. pressed again months later after more media inquiries. This time, the informant agreed.
The Washington Post outright contradicts CNN’s story, stating that Trump’s 2017 disclosure of classified information to Lavrov and Kislyak “was not the reason for the decision to remove the CIA asset.” The Times similarly contradicts CNN’s version of events, reporting that “former intelligence officials said there was no public evidence that Mr. Trump directly endangered the source, and other current American officials insisted that media scrutiny of the agency’s sources alone was the impetus for the extraction.”
This weekend, as Sciutto and Stelter agreed that Sciutto’s reporting on the matter was great, the first mention of the Post and the Times’ contradictory reporting came approximately six minutes into their discussion of the matter. It was the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser who finally brought up the elephant in the room, and she did so mostly to argue that the reports are actually not “in dispute.”
Sciutto then said, “The prior consideration of exfiltrating this source was also in our story.”
No, the “prior consideration” was not mentioned in the CNN story. Even the updated version of his report still does not mention that the agency offered to withdraw the agent back when Barack Obama was still president. Sciutto’s report states only that at the end of the Obama administration, U.S. intelligence officials “expressed concerns about the safety of this spy and other Russian assets.”
Sciutto, who is himself an Obama administration alum, continued, declaring it a dirty Trump White House tactic to question his reporting.
“And what happened, as you know, is that with stories like this, that particularly involve the president, that the messaging machine, including Fox News, sadly, it’s a fact, moves into motion and cites details to the advantage of a counternarrative, right?” asked the reporter.
“Right!” responded Stelter.
Stelter then added, “It is a reality of the world we live in … a troubling reality that there’s this spin machine that’s very powerful these days. But the facts in your story and the Times and the Post — all lot of them pretty much all line up!”
True, the facts “pretty much all line up,” if you ignore all the parts that don’t.
(h/t Brent Baker)
