How Democrat Activists Conned The Country By Pretending To Be ‘Journalists’

On Oct. 14, MS NOW’s Ken Dilanian reported that FBI Director Kash Patel had secretly traveled to Russia for meetings with the Russian security service, the FSB. The sensational story was attributed to two anonymous sources and immediately suggested that the FBI director was involved in some sinister dealings with Moscow.

There was just one problem. Patel was in Virginia, attending an event at Liberty University. Within hours, Dilanian was forced to retract his report.

What makes this episode particularly revealing is Dilanian’s history. In 2014, The Intercept exposed emails showing that Dilanian, then at the Los Angeles Times, had routinely submitted drafts of his articles to CIA officials for review before publication, even making changes based on their feedback. In one exchange, he sent a revised draft to his CIA contacts asking, “Does this look better?”

At what point does it become absurd to keep treating people like this as journalists?

There is an entire world operating behind the headlines that most Americans know almost nothing about. A world in which political operatives, intelligence officials, and the media work together in an interconnected system that manufactures scandals, destroys reputations, and unleashes the power of government against political opponents.

Russiagate exposed this world, yet 10 years later, conservatives still talk about media bias, as though the problem were simply journalists who dislike Donald Trump.

The real problem is media lawfare. The media are embedded in the machinery itself, performing functions every bit as important as those carried out by political operatives and intelligence officials. And that machinery will never be understood or taken down so long as its media participants continue to be treated as journalists.

Russiagate remains the prime example of how this machinery operates. Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign manufactured the Trump-Russia collusion narrative and used its contractors, Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele, to disguise its allegations as independent intelligence. That much is now widely understood, at least among conservatives. What remains far less understood is that major media organizations were themselves integral to the operation.

The Washington Post helped launch the Russia narrative in June 2016 with a breathless article declaring that Russian hackers had stolen files from the Democratic National Committee. Years later, CrowdStrike Services’ own president admitted under oath that his firm had no evidence that the data had ever left the DNC’s computers. Meanwhile, Fusion GPS worked directly with New York Times editors and reporters, supplying material for the paper’s false August 2016 story about Paul Manafort that directly led to his removal as Trump’s campaign chairman.

But perhaps the most revealing example involved ABC News and an innocent American businessman named Sergei Millian.

In the summer of 2016, ABC’s Matthew Mosk arranged for Millian, who was traveling in Asia, to return to New York for a July interview with Brian Ross. According to Fusion GPS’s own account, its founders, Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, told ABC to get Millian on camera.

The arrangement served two purposes. First, to obtain footage of Millian that could be weaponized against Trump. Second, it would bring Millian to New York at a specific time, allowing Steele’s operative Igor Danchenko to meet him and subsequently attribute fabricated allegations of Trump-Russia collusion to him.

Danchenko traveled to New York but failed to meet Millian. That failure was instrumental in exposing the fraud underlying Steele’s central collusion allegation. The supposed source of the dossier’s most explosive claims had never even spoken to the man who supposedly obtained them from him. The entire sourcing chain for the central conspiracy allegation was nonexistent.

Mosk and Ross, meanwhile, got their interview. But ABC never broadcast it.

Instead, two months later, on Sept. 22, Good Morning America suddenly aired a few carefully selected clips portraying ordinary real estate transactions involving Russian buyers as suspicious.

That very same day, Hillary Clinton’s campaign released an attack advertisement featuring the ABC footage.

The only inference that can be drawn is that ABC had supplied the footage to Clinton’s operation in advance, with the Good Morning America broadcast providing a convenient alibi for how the campaign obtained it. After sitting on the interview for two months, ABC released precisely the material Clinton needed, on precisely the day she needed it.

Millian understood that he had been set up. He accused Mosk of manipulating his statements, conducting the interview under false pretenses, and destroying his reputation. “You m[a]liciously lied to me,” he told Mosk.

And these same so-called journalists reappeared in another Russiagate episode. On Dec. 1, 2017, Ross falsely reported that Trump had “instructed” Michael Flynn “to contact Russian officials during the [presidential] campaign.” ABC was forced to retract the claim and suspend Ross. Mosk was also credited on the report.

Another revealing episode occurred in September 2016, when Clinton’s contractors at Fusion GPS arranged for Steele to brief supposed journalists from ABC, Yahoo News, The New York Times, and The New Yorker at Washington’s Tabard Inn. The Washington Post received a separate briefing. Clinton’s own operatives were personally introducing reporters to the man her campaign was paying to manufacture allegations against Trump. Yet none of those reporters disclosed the arrangement to their audiences. It took Devin Nunes’ congressional investigation, more than a year later, to begin exposing the connections that the media themselves had never seen fit to reveal.

Two days later, Yahoo’s Michael Isikoff published Steele’s allegations against Carter Page, which the FBI subsequently cited in its surveillance application against Page. Clinton’s political allegations had been turned into media stories and then used by federal investigators as apparent independent corroboration.

After Trump’s election, the process became even more brazen. FBI Director James Comey briefed Trump on salacious allegations from Steele’s dossier, creating the official event CNN needed to report the story. Internal FBI correspondence shows that Comey and his deputy Andrew McCabe were aware of how the briefing would provide CNN with its news hook.

These were interconnected operations involving campaign contractors, intelligence officials, and media personnel, each playing a different role within the same machinery.

And Russiagate was only the beginning. The Ukraine impeachment operation, CNN’s presence at the pre-dawn FBI raid on Roger Stone, the Trump indictments, and the Covid origins cover-up, including the “Proximal Origin” paper, all involve deeply entangled working relationships between political operatives, government officials, intelligence agencies, and media organizations.

There is an entire lawfare ecosystem whose participants, relationships, and methods remain largely hidden from public view. And nothing protects that ecosystem more effectively than the continuing fiction that its media participants are merely journalists.

Which brings the story back to Ken Dilanian of MS NOW. On Oct. 13, just one day before his latest Russia story collapsed, federal Judge Timothy Kelly extended an order preserving White House access for CNN, MS NOW, and Politico, finding that the administration had likely violated their constitutional rights by excluding them over unfavorable coverage.

The ruling illustrates how conservatives remain trapped in a fundamentally mistaken paradigm.

Trump complains about fake news, DOJ argues about White House access, journalists invoke press freedom, and judges apply the same old precedents about viewpoint discrimination. The entire debate revolves around the supposed rights and privileges of journalists, when the fundamental question should be whether the individuals claiming those privileges are actually performing the functions of independent journalists.

Take Marc Elias and Norm Eisen, two prominent figures in the political lawfare onslaught of the past decade. No one would seriously argue that either man has a constitutional right to access the West Wing to pursue his political objectives. Yet when media personnel perform essentially the same functions, participating in the same operations, pursuing the same objectives, and working toward the same outcomes, we are suddenly told that denying them access is an assault on the Constitution. The fact that one operates under a law firm’s letterhead while another operates under the CNN or ABC logo changes absolutely nothing about the function being performed.

And this is the point which conservatives have failed to grasp.

The entire approach must change. DOJ must begin examining media personnel as participants in the lawfare machinery rather than framing cases around journalistic bias. The FCC must bring far greater scrutiny to the conduct of broadcast licensees implicated in these operations. Above all, the public must understand how this hidden ecosystem functions.

For 10 years, conservatives have been fighting the wrong fight because they have fundamentally misunderstood the machinery they are up against.

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