Manafort/Assange Drama Proves Media Will Buy Any Russia Conspiracy Story, No Matter Its Flaws

1. The information operation that pushed this story turned out to have been secretly developed and funded by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, a fact uncovered only through the tenacious digging of Republicans on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in the face of major opposition from the media and Democrats on the committee.
2. A document from Ecuador’s Senain intelligence agency allegedly claimed a Manaford had visited Assange along with Russians. The story mentioned the discredited dossier that journalists wrote about and intelligence agencies used to secure wiretaps on Trump associates despite the failure to verify its claims.
3. The latest questionably sourced information in support of this dramatic tale that opponents of Trump cling to in order to delegitimize the results of the 2016 election is that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort secretly met with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in 2013, 2015 and, ominously, in spring of 2016, just as the Trump campaign was heating up.
4. I suppose it's possible that this outlandish story has merit, that a close ally of Trump was working with WikiLeaks in an election year and it never managed to come out or get leaked, wasn't caught on visitor logs or by any of the U.K.'s over-eager spies who were all over everyone else who knew Trump.
5. It's been seven and a half months, for instance, since McClatchy's Peter Stone and Greg Gordon claimed, without evidence, that the special counsel had the goods showing that Trump attorney Michael Cohen had gone to Prague to collude with Russia in the run-up to the 2016 election.
6. Many media figures have swallowed whole, without evidence, a conspiracy theory that Donald Trump became president by treasonously colluding with Russia to steal the 2016 election from its rightful owner, Hillary Clinton.
7. The authors expected people to believe that Manafort and Assange, two highly surveilled people, had not one, not two, but three meetings never noticed by intelligence agencies? Most crazy of all was the notion that this explosive piece of collusion evidence was real but never leaked until now.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/28/manafort-assange-drama-proves-media-will-buy-any-russia-conspiracy-story-no-matter-its-flaws/