The FBI at the agency's headquarters in Washington on June 14, 2018. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

The ‘Wrong Scandal’ Keeps Winning

Commentary

There’s no longer any real competition between the two major political scandals that emerged following the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Proponents of the first scandal, commonly referred to as “Russiagate,” claim that the man who had just won the election was an undercover agent who took orders straight from Moscow.

The other one that emerged held that Russiagate was always a false construct of the rival Hillary Clinton campaign and its politicized allies within the federal government’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies. This second scandal came to be called “Spygate.”

One of these scandals was indeed fake and the other was very real.

Most of the U.S. media went all-in on the proposition that the fake scandal was real and the real scandal was fake.

However, the scandal that was endlessly promoted by mainstream news outlets turned out to be a hoax, as shown by the investigations by special counsel Robert Mueller and Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General Michael Horowitz. Meanwhile, the scandal they dismissed as a “wild conspiracy theory” turned out to be real.

That means all the mainstream news media organizations, with their vast budgets and massive manpower, managed to get the major story of the 2016 presidential election exactly backward.

It’s not an exaggeration to say Spygate is a political scandal that dwarfs Watergate, when Republican President Richard Nixon attempted to cover up an unsuccessful attempt to spy on the Democratic Party’s phone calls using some off-the-books political operatives to bug the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters inside the Watergate Hotel.

That operation was a farce. The first set of listening devices planted in the phones by Nixon’s “plumbers” never worked, and it was while they were making another foray into DNC headquarters to place a second set that they were caught in the act by an observant security guard.

What happened in Spygate is much worse than that. Clinton and her allies achieved an investigation of and spied on a rival’s campaign through the agencies of the federal government. The supposedly nonpartisan powers of federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies were put to partisan political purposes, based on a carefully managed fraud.

This past week, the usual mainstream media suspects brazenly attempted to launch what I instantly dubbed “The Trump–Russia Collusion Hoax 2.o.” To say the launch of this new hoax isn’t going well would be a massive understatement.

How do mainstream journalists and news broadcasters expect to be taken seriously when they are continuing to push blatant absurdities? They told the country for most of Trump’s first term that the real scandal was Russiagate, and Spygate was just some conspiracy theory cooked up by right-wing zealots.

Think about what an epic walk-back that would be at this point. So they have decided to simply not do any kind of retraction at all and to forge ahead with grim determination.

For these media, it’s incredibly embarrassing that it’s the wrong scandal for which evidence surfaces to support its reality. Many of these reporters and broadcasters simply can’t bring themselves to make this admission publicly.

Well, the longer they wait to issue the needed mea culpas, the more painful it will be for them.

Because the Spygate scandal is still far from over.

At present, these media outlets content themselves with predictions that U.S. Attorney John Durham, who is leading the DOJ’s investigation into the origins of the Russiagate hoax, won’t really find anything.

The truth is, a fake scandal that was started based on lies, deception, and fraud ended with a whimper with Horowitz’s FISA abuse report.

The real scandal starts when Durham goes public to show the country what he’s found during his months of investigating how the Russiagate fraud was perpetrated upon the entire country.

Brian Cates is a writer based in South Texas and the author of “Nobody Asked For My Opinion … But Here It Is Anyway!” He can be reached on Twitter @drawandstrike.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.