Example #6,708,757,907 of journalism malpractice during President Donald Trump’s term: U.S. intel walking back the claims Russian put bounties on American troops.
The Daily Beast subheadline: “But according to a newly disclosed assessment, Donald Trump might have been right to call it a ‘hoax.'”
The New York Times caused a commotion in June 2020 with its report about Russia supposedly paying militants and the Taliban to murder U.S. troops. The information came from anonymous sources.
Trump’s intelligence team did not have confidence in the reports.
Did anyone listen? Of course not! The left and their friends in the MSM talked as if everything was true, especially since they still think Trump was Vladimir Putin’s puppet.
Then-candidate Biden unloaded on Trump over the reports:
“His entire presidency has been a gift to Putin, but this is beyond the pale,” Biden said during a virtual town hall Saturday. “It’s betrayal of the most sacred duty we bear as a nation to protect and equip our troops when we send them into harm’s way. It’s a betrayal of every single American family with a loved one serving in Afghanistan or anywhere overseas.”
The Daily Beast quietly reported:
Significantly, the Biden team announced a raft of sanctions on Thursday. But those sanctions, targeting Russia’s sovereign debt market, are prompted only by Russia’s interference in the 2020 election and its alleged role in the SolarWinds cyber espionage. (In contrast, Biden administration officials said that their assessment attributing the breach of technology company SolarWinds to hackers from Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service was “high confidence.”)“We have noted our conclusion of the review that we conducted on the bounties issue and we have conveyed through diplomatic, intelligence, and military channels strong, direct messages on this issue, but we are not specifically tying the actions we are taking today to that matter,” a senior administration official told reporters in reference to the bounty claims.According to the officials on Thursday’s call, the reporting about the alleged “bounties” came from “detainee reporting” – raising the specter that someone told their U.S.-aligned Afghan jailers what they thought was necessary to get out of a cage. Specifically, the official cited “information and evidence of connections to criminal agents in Afghanistan and elements of the Russian government” as sources for the intelligence community’s assessment.Without additional corroboration, such reporting is notoriously unreliable. Detainee reporting from a man known as Ibn Shaikh al-Libi, extracted from torture, infamously and bogusly fueled a Bush administration claim, used to invade Iraq, about Saddam Hussein training al-Qaeda to make poison gas.
But as information came out, the media seemed to bury it because it would harm the narrative. The Daily Beast included its report last summer of former diplomats and intelligence officers who viewed “the bounties account skeptically.” One of those diplomats said, “someone leaked this to slow down the troop withdrawal.”
I honestly do not remember anyone broadcasting those views. I also don’t remember the AP article with Gen. Frank McKenzie, the senior U.S. general for the Middle East and South Asia, saying “there seemed to be no ‘causative link” to any actual U.S. deaths.”
Cannot promote those viewpoints! Only Trump calling the information a “hoax” gained any traction.
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