Yesterday the New York Times ran a rather astonishing story. The FBI, working through their mouthpiece, New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt, revealed that it had employed an agent of an intelligence organization (they want us to believe this woman named “Azra Truk” is an FBI counterintelligence agent but they never say so and that, as they say, is a “tell”) to try to build a personal relationship with then-Trump adviser George Papadopoulos.

The story is extraordinary from a couple of angles. First, it shows that even though the FBI elected to not give a defensive briefing to Candidate Trump on their concerns about some members of his campaign, they did elect to try to spy on some members of that campaign. Papadopoulos believes that Turk was one of at least two women dangled in front of him hinting they would trade sex for information (let me pause here for a second and remind everyone that men often mistake mere attention for sexual interest). Of course, if they went to this extent on Papadopoulos, you know a “high value target” like Carter Page probably had FBI folks crawling up his butt. Second, we learn the operation was run by a counterintelligence agent from the New York field office of the FBI who just happened to have a long history of working with NeverTrump fanatic, former US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara. What makes it really interesting is that the FBI prophylactically revealed the story ahead of the upcoming report by DOJ IG Michael Horowitz and are the spin they put on it was that they did this to protect the Trump campaign.

Anyway you cut it, this would be significant story to a news organization. But if you were invested in the collusion hoax and anything that made the backstory to that hoax look untoward would not be helpful. Of all the pretend-unbiased media, two outlets fall squarely into the latter category. CNN and MSNBC have pushed every half-baked story on the collusion hoax for at least two years. And, lo and behold, MSNBC has no stories since yesterday mentioning either Azra Turk or Papadopoulos.

CNN is only a little better. Papadopoulos is mentioned in this 48-word story that effectively sanitizes the events to sound like a business meeting. Azra Turk is not mentioned at all.

I don’t know what they mentioned on air, but it is pretty clear that this story didn’t rate a mention anywhere near the hysteria that numerous and demonstrably fake stories about Papadopoulos did rate.

This is not mere editorial judgment. When the FBI admits it ran a counterintelligence operation against a member of a political campaign, that is news because that is just not the way our political system is supposed to work. When they made this admission to the New York Times, it is significant. When a network has devoted the level of resources to the collusion hoax that have CNN and MSNBC, you can’t say that you don’t see a reason to cover the story. There is exactly one reason. The collusion narrative is in tatters. Everyday it is looking more and more like a soft coup attempt in which the major media were knowingly or inadvertently complicit. They want the story to go away because the can see how this ends if the story doesn’t die.

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Promoted from the diaries by streiff. Promotion does not imply endorsement.

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