Glenn Thrush, Self-Proclaimed Politico “Hack,” Mired in Wikileaks
“Because I have become a hack I will send u the whole section that pertains to u”
In the midst of the furor over the Podesta email leaks, Politico finds itself in the middle of the media bias scandal many of the emails have revealed.
In 2015 , Glenn Thrush, Politico’s chief White House correspondent, sent an article he was writing at the time to Podesta so that he could approve it. At least Thrush knew he was acting improperly for a supposed “journalist” and recognized himself as a “hack” while begging Podesta not to “share or tell anyone” he “did this.”
A Politico reporter called himself a “hack” when he asked Hillary Clinton’s top campaign aide John Podesta to look over sections of his unpublished report on the Democratic presidential candidate before publication, a recent email revealed by WikiLeaks shows.
The May 2015 story, written by Glenn Thrush, Politico’s chief White House correspondent, was titled, “Hillary’s big-money dilemma.” The article focused on early difficulties Clinton’s campaign would face to raise money during the 2016 White House run.
But the language used in his email raised eyebrows, especially in the conservative blogosphere.
“Because I have become a hack I will send u the whole section that pertains to u [sic],” Thrush wrote to Podesta. “Please don’t share or tell anyone I did this…tell me if I f—ed up anything.”
Podesta responded and gave the section his blessing.
Politico is defending Thrush . . . while not quite addressing the language of the email he sent to Podesta beyond saying Thrush is “self-deprecating.”
Fox New continues:
Brad Dayspring, Politico’s vice president of communications, defended Thrush as “one of the top political reporters in the country” who makes sure he dots his i’s and reaches out to sources on both sides of the aisle. Dayspring, apparently referring to the “hack” comment, said Thrush is “self-deprecating.”
“Glenn got the chairman of the notoriously secretive Clinton campaign” to “confirm a bunch of inside information that he culled from other sources,” Dayspring said in an email to Fox News.
The published article in question can be read in full here.
Thrush took to Twitter to espouse his innocent intent and to defend his journalistic integrity.
My goal in emailing Podesta: TO GET HIM TO CONFIRM STUFF I HAD FROM LESSER SOURCES. It worked. Nobody controls my stories but me. Troll on!
— Glenn Thrush (@GlennThrush) October 17, 2016
People are having trouble with this “explanation.”
so why ask him not to tell anyone? If it's good reporting, he should tell everyone.
— Judd Bagley (@WriterJudd) October 18, 2016
Huge difference between confirming information with subject of a story and providing them the piece.
— Dan Szymborski (@DSzymborski) October 17, 2016
If I ever acted in this manner, I can't think of any editor I know who would be willing to work with me again.
— Dan Szymborski (@DSzymborski) October 17, 2016
Hey Glenn. I think the common question is, if your practice is common, why ask Podesta not to tell anybody you were doing it?
— Joe Concha (@JoeConchaTV) October 18, 2016
You may recall, that Thrush was also on the list for a glitzy Team Hillary “messaging” party at which the stated goals included, “framing the HRC message and framing the race.”
Watch Thrush discuss Comey’s decision regarding the Hillary email scandal.
Ironically, Politico runs stories about the public distrust of the media with some regularity, bemoaning new polls showing the distrust in media is at an “all-time low” or that the “opinion of media never worse,” noting that Trump takes credit for the public’s distrust of media, observing that conservatives trust media less than Democrats, and on.
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Comments
If this guy had an ounce of integrity, he would already have resigned. But don’t no one hold their breath. . . .
When was Glenn Thrush NOT a hack…? My memory doesn’t go back to the end of time…
“Because I have become a hack” could be innocent, and not a statement to be taken literally; similar to me writing something like, “Of course I could be wrong…”
But as several Twitterers supra point out, the admonition re secrecy is not so easily dismissed.
It’s not a slam-dunk, but the suspicion that he is indeed a hack, and knows it, is very strong.
Of course, given the Politico connection … the suspicion would be pretty strong anyway.
When does his MSNBC show begin?
In the tank so deep he’s nearly drowning. A total disgrace.
Welp, there goes the excuse that he was pressured by his bosses into being supportive of a particular candidate.
Glenn Thrush: “I was young! I needed the money!”
Reason number 12,394 why HRC may experience some “turbulence” governing.
Is she going to have any media outlets who are even slightly believable to market her agenda? It reminds me of the old Soviet-era joke: there is no truth in Pravda or news in Izvestia.
Thrush and Politico can try to spin it all they want. There is no part of, “Because I’ve become a hack” and “Don’t tell anyone I sent you this” that I don’t get.
Politico started out okay, but shortly became a mouthpiece for the ‘rats.
Disgusting but unsurprising story.
Is he a Leftist activist hack? Doesn’t he write for Politico?
Hasn’t been fired yet, or forced to resign, though has he?
This isn’t just about him, its about the credibility of every organization he works for.
I’m sure any day now the “self-depracating ‘hack'” will clear all this up by releasing his emails to Republican campaign managers in which he did the exact same thing using the exact same language.
I won’t hold my breath.
I also won’t call thrush a prostitute. That would be an insult to prostitutes. I have a pretty detailed knowledge of prostitutes, having spent 20 years in the Navy, and nearly all of that time deployed to the Western Pacific and Indian Ocean. What was I going to do, stay on the boat or lock myself in a hotel room? And you literally would have to lock yourself in the room, as should you has brought in hookers because the Navy is in town for Cobra Gold or Ulchi/Focus Lens or just a port visit.
As an aside, Sailors don’t actually deserve their reputation as patrons of prostitutes. My carrier battle group actually got a nasty letter from the mayor of Mombasa. Bars and hotels brought in prostitutes from all over East Africa at considerable expense. And, they nearly went broke because the Sailors were sitting around the hotel pools drinking Tusker beers and not partaking. And the mayor, who clearly had a financial stake in the sex trade, was not happy. I wish I had kept a copy of his letter.
None of this is funny. At all. The sex trade is slavery. I wish I had kept a copy of that letter because it was ironically flattering, considering the source and the subject. If the mayor of Mombasa is P.O.’d at me over the fact I don’t pay for sex, I’ll take that as a compliment. But it doesn’t help the women who are forced into that life, and my heart breaks for them.
I don’t want to overgeneralize. But broadly speaking throughout the third world people have various traditions that blame the women for their own fate. In Africa, traditional rural Africa, a man chooses a wife who can best help him get through life. So that means a good worker. In almost all of traditional rural Africa it’s the woman who tends the fields, collects the firewood and fetches water, brews the beer, makes babies, and cooks and serves the food. The man hunts when he feels like it and guards the crops at night when necessary. And drinks the beer the woman brews for him and helps her with the baby making. That’s important, because children are the third world’s version of social security. If you’re old and childless, you’re going to die quickly because no one will take care of you. It’s so important that making babies before you get married is actually a plus for a girl, as it’s proof of fertility.
So, a woman who is too much trouble has no prospect of marrying. What makes a woman too much trouble? It could be something as simple as being too beautiful. If a woman is too beautiful that will make the man’s life harder, not easier. Being a half-caste makes a woman too much trouble. All sorts of things; Africa is a big place. But generally speaking, at least in the places I’ve been in Africa, no matter what it’s the woman’s fault she’s cursed. So what is that woman to do, who has only one asset her society values standing between her and starvation?
It’s a bit easier to explain Asia because of the Buddhist concept of Karma. She must have done something in her past life to deserve her evil fate. The soul crushing thing is many of the women believe it, too.
So, I don’t pay for sex. But I will tip big when I head down to the hotel bar and sing karaoke with them. Or when I head to my favorite watering hole in Bangkok, the King’s X, because they have board games behind the bar, and the girls are good (or were; I haven’t been there in at least ten years) at my favorite, Jenga. Because if they’re playing Jenga or singing karaoke with me they’re not doing something else which would be far more lucrative. And their only hope is to pay down their “debt.” In most cases in Asia women are prostitutes because their parents sold them into it. So the “recruiters” travel around with binders or folders with pictures of things, particularly houses, in impoverished areas that they’re willing to trade for their daughters. And once the “recruiters,” more properly called pimps, pay for that house the girl has to work it off.
It is a cruel, brutal form of slavery. And maybe I deserve judgement for associating with it but again I didn’t see how I could have avoided it other than not joining the Navy. It was something of a relief visiting Singapore or Australia as those were the only places I visited where I could be reasonably confident the women I’d run into were not professional sex workers. In most of the world, at least the parts of the world where I operated, the monied families you might read about in the society pages of the New York Times don’t send out their debutantes to meet the fleet when it pulls in to port.
So, I’m sure by now everyone is wondering what is the point, other than Arminius can write a book about prostitutes? The point is this; I can have an honest relationship with a prostitute. I know most of you reading this won’t believe I didn’t pay them for sex. But maybe some of you who are Catholic and still feel the throbbing pain of the calcium deposit where the nun jabbed you near the collar bone with her finger or across the knuckles with the ruler might just understand the sense of guilt I started out with before I even got to Asia. And that there were just some bridges I couldn’t cross. Some of us were such boy scouts that the foreign working girls in Japan, lured to the country from the Philippines or Thailand or what have you by the Yakuza with contracts as entertainers but upon arrival confiscated their passports and forced them into prostitution, trusted us with the money they were hiding from their slave masters. We were the only ones they could trust.
I know prostitutes. Glenn Thrush is no prostitute. The lying, back stabbing b*st*rd is unworthy of the title. He is an insult to prostitutes.
“as should you VENTURE DOWN TO THE HOTEL BAR OR RESTAURANT YOU’D DISCOVER MANAGEMENT has brought in hookers because the Navy is in town for Cobra Gold or Ulchi/Focus Lens or just a port visit. ”
I has spelling. I’ve tried to clean my laptop of the malware but SKYNET is not easily defeated and my laptop of has this annoying habit of auto deleting text. In the blink of an eye.
Sometimes I see it marking and deleting the text, sometimes it happens too quickly and I don’t.
So feel free to hate me for the content of speech. But my parents did sacrifice to send me to Catholic schools (what, didn’t everyone use grocery crates instead of furniture back in the sixties?) so proper grammar is not one of my 99 problems. If you read one of my comments and it just doesn’t make sense because words seem to be missing, they are. It’s SKYNET.
I gave myself a down vote for this. Just because. Screw everyone.
I want an edit button, or at least an end to the automatic edit function. I’d rather make my own typos, because the substitutions by the auto edit are less intelligible than my own.
Another hack for Hillary? Called me surprised… NOT!
New hash tag trending: #HacksforHillary
I can see I won’t get any credit for pointing out that Glenn Thrush could end this discussion by releasing similar emails between him and GOP campaign managers.
And we all know those emails don’t exist.
Which is fine. I was intel. There’s two kinds of intel types. There’s the type that gets promoted. “Spy,” says the Admiral, how much is 2 plus 2? The intel guy takes a quick glance out the door, goes to the window, looks outside, then pulls the shades, and whispers into the Admiral’s ear, “How much do you want it to be?”
Then there’s me. And I’m not alone.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/09/exclusive-50-spies-say-isis-intelligence-was-cooked.html
“More than 50 intelligence analysts working out of the U.S. military’s Central Command have formally complained that their reports on ISIS and al Qaeda’s branch in Syria were being inappropriately altered by senior officials, The Daily Beast has learned.
The complaints spurred the Pentagon’s inspector general to open an investigation into the alleged manipulation of intelligence…”
Somebody has to deliver the bad news. That was me for twenty years. Slipping the leadership the high hard one. So if I’m not getting thumbs down, if I’m not losing the popularity contest, I have to wonder what I’m doing wrong.