Have you heard there’s another confidential memo from Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) on possible indiscretions by intelligence agencies? Quinta Jurecic of Lawfare is thoroughly tired of the circus:
It’s impossible to comment definitively on the memo while it remains classified. At the moment, following a party-line vote by the House intelligence committee, the classified document is available to all members of Congress—though lawmakers reportedly must sign a non-disclosure agreement in order to view it. But as Trump supporters and Trump-aligned House Republicans beat the #ReleasetheMemo drumbeat, here is a modest prediction: if and when the memo is ever made public, it is likely to be just one more string of spaghetti tossed onto the wall by the now-familiar alliance of Trump-supporting congressional Republicans and sympathetic conservative media desperate to discredit and distract from the investigations into Russian election interference. …
At this point, any work product from Devin Nunes concerning matters related to the Russia investigation should be taken with a healthy helping of salt. Although Nunes still chairs the House intelligence committee, he was forced to remove himself from its Russia probe after a bewildering March press conference in which he announced concern over possible incidental collection of Trump transition-team information. (Reports later showed that the White House had leaked Nunes the allegedly alarming material on “unmasking.”) After months, Bloomberg’s Eli Lake—originally sympathetic to Nunes’s concerns—reported that National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster had found no evidence to support Nunes’s allegations of wrongdoing.
And as far as Quinta is concerned, it’s just another cycle of deceit:
At this point, the feedback loop of disinformation between Trump-friendly congressional Republicans, the White House and pro-Trump media has become familiar. The cycle runs like this: Congressional Republicans voice concerns about an alleged abuse of government authority under President Obama or an instance of anti-Trump bias; one of a small group of relatively marginal media outlets writes about their theories and investigations, drawing yawns from more traditional reporters; then Fox News—usually including Sean Hannity—devotes breathless attention to the story; President Trump tweets about it; Fox and Congress respond to the president’s tweets; and around and around we go.
For those readers late to the game, Rep. Nunes is widely considered Russia’s strongest ally in Congress.
Here’s a thought: why do these entities continue to be treated as reliable sources of information? Fox News, Breitbart, all of those that are hyping this dubious memo, why do readers keep reading them? Do readers ever scratch their heads and wonder if they ever will get significant, accurate news from them? Or is it only the experts with skin in the game that realize that some news sources are significantly flawed and untrustworthy?
And in this age of anti-expertism, it doesn’t really help when an expert marks a source as contaminated, as driven by an inferior agenda.
