August 4, 2017
BY HOOK OR BY CROOK:
The Email That Gives Away The Pro-Trump Media's Seth Rich Game (Matt Gertz, August 4, 2017, Media Matters)
Wheeler's lawsuit reveals that Butowsky's concern with the Rich investigation had little to do with getting elusive justice for the murdered DNC staffer. It was a political operation aimed at protecting the president from the Russia scandal -- one that Fox was eager to support.Butowsky made that clear in an email he sent to a list of Fox staff hours before the FoxNews.com's story's publication. "One of the big conclusions we need to draw from this is that the Russians did not hack our computer systems and ste[a]l emails," he wrote, "and there was no collusion like trump with the Russians." The pro-Trump press had been searching for a way to defuse the collusion bomb, and Butowsky hoped he had found it.In the days that followed, pro-Trump Fox hosts Steve Doocy, who had received Butowsky's email, and Sean Hannity, the most prominent champion of Rich conspiracy theories, promoted the story using Butowsky's language (emphasis added):
May 16: Doocy reports, "For a long time on the internet and elsewhere, he has been rumored to have been the one who gave WikiLeaks the DNC emails. So, if that is true, and we don't know yet, it looks like Russia didn't give it to WikiLeaks. It was Seth Rich, perhaps."May 16: Hannity claims that "explosive developments" in the Rich story "could completely shatter the narrative that in fact WikiLeaks was working with the Russians, or there was collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians."May 18: Hannity claims: "If Rich, in fact, was WikiLeaks' source for DNC email leaks, it would confirm Russia was not involved. ... Wouldn't that blow the Russian collusion narrative that the media has been pushing out of the water?"May 19: Hannity claims: "What if it was somebody that was so disgruntled in the DNC at how they cheated Bernie and how the fix was in, if that turned out to be true that somebody did that, wouldn't that completely wipe out the entire Russia lie we've heard for months and months?"The lawsuit also adds new details that suggest that the story, published amid a slew of negative stories about the president and Russia, was deliberately timed to blunt the Russia debacle...
Someone has to lead the sheep.
Posted by Orrin Judd at August 4, 2017 5:20 AM