Posted on Monday, August 4, 2025
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by David Catron
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27 Comments
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If anyone still wonders why the legacy media is held in such low regard by the public, the mystery can be cleared up with an internet search for news concerning the investigation initiated by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard into the origins of the Russia collusion hoax. The search will reveal that most of the major news outlets either ignored or dismissed her revelation that the probe was manufactured at the behest of then-President Obama, who authorized a fraudulent intelligence assessment alleging that the 2016 Trump presidential campaign knowingly accepted assistance from Russian assets in order to defeat Hillary Clinton.
On Friday, July 18, DNI Gabbard declassified and publicly released more than 100 pages of documentary evidence proving that Obama had rejected an earlier intelligence assessment that concluded Russian interference had no meaningful effect on the outcome of the 2016 election. She also published a detailed timeline illustrating when Obama’s intelligence officials were directed to cobble together the phony assessment and how they began leaking false intelligence from that report to Obama-friendly publications like The Washington Post. Gabbard followed all of this up with criminal referrals to the Department of Justice.
In a media environment populated by honest editors and journalists, this explosive story would have immediately sucked all of the oxygen out of the weekend news cycle. Indeed, if these revelations had been about a Republican president meddling with an intelligence assessment for political purposes, it would undoubtedly have smothered all other news for at least a month.
However, even after DNI Gabbard declassified a report from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) a week later, the major media outlets still gave it only cursory coverage. Gabbard offered the following observations:
“It’s interesting to see how when they do cover this, they don’t actually cover the revelations … Number one is they don’t want the American people to know the truth. But also, they recognize the mainstream media’s complicity in this, that they were fed early lines from this manufactured intelligence assessment that President Obama ordered, that John Brennan and James Clapper created without any vetting, without any actual journalistic integrity of looking at what they were being fed.”
It will, however, be increasingly difficult for the corporate media to keep a lid on all of this now that FBI Director Kash Patel has discovered “burn bags” filled with thousands of documents dating back to the bureau’s 2016 Trump-Russia probe.
As The New York Post reports, “One of the documents, discovered in a purported secret room at the FBI’s DC headquarters, is a classified annex to the 2023 report by then-special counsel John Durham that scrutinized the original probe, code-named ‘Crossfire Hurricane.’” This now-declassified annex unequivocally confirms Hillary Clinton’s key role in launching the Russia collusion hoax.
Consequently, the corporate media cover-up isn’t going too well. When DNI Gabbard released the first tranche of documents, the editors of the major news outlets evidently hoped the story would “die in darkness.” The Washington Post ignored it until Tuesday of the following week when “fact checker” Glenn Kessler tried and failed to debunk her charges. The Wall Street Journal finally addressed the story the next day by accusing Gabbard of promoting a conspiracy theory. The New York Times dismissed her revelations except to give two former Obama officials a platform to issue a thinly veiled threat against the DNI:
“Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, and John Ratcliffe, the Central Intelligence Agency director, have over the past month claimed that senior officials of the Obama administration manufactured politicized intelligence, silenced intelligence professionals, and engaged in a broad “treasonous conspiracy” to undermine the presidency of Donald Trump… In making those allegations, they seek to rewrite history. We want to set the record straight and, in doing so, sound a warning.”
This appeared in the Times as a “guest essay” written by two perpetrators of the Russia collusion hoax – former CIA Director John Brennan and former DNI James Clapper. Both were in the Dec. 9, 2016, meeting called by then-President Obama the day after he rejected the original intelligence community assessment (ICA). During this meeting, Obama indicated that he wanted a “new” ICA – one that materialized in January of 2017. Over objections of career analysts, the new assessment contained unverifiable information, including parts of the notorious Steele Dossier, suggesting that the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia.
Print publications like The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times are by no means alone in ignoring or dismissing all of this. As Fox News reports, the major broadcast networks that spent 2,284 minutes covering the Russia collusion hoax have all but ignored DNI Gabbard’s revelations: “The nightly newscasts of ABC and NBC skipped it. CBS gave it 41 seconds. On cable, CNN’s Jeff Zeleny sniffed, “This is hardly information that we should even be repeating.” At MSNBC, all of the evidence revealed by DNI Gabbard was summarily dismissed: “Not much new here.”
Anyone hoping to understand who perpetrated the Russia collusion hoax and why they did it will be forced to look beyond the corporate media for answers. They will never come clean on this because they were complicit in the hoax and are now compounding that disgrace by participating in its cover-up. Republican Senator Chuck Grassley (IA), who just declassified this section of the Durham Report, has described this outrage as “one of the biggest political scandals and cover-ups in American history.”
The good news is that neither the media nor their Democrat accomplices will be able to bury this. In the end, the truth will come out.
David Catron is a Senior Editor at the American Spectator. His writing has also appeared in PJ Media, the American Thinker, the Providence Journal, the Catholic Exchange and a variety of other publications.
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