You knew this was going to be the reaction from The Washington Post’s fact-check crew, and they totally whiffed. I mean, they missed miserably, not that we didn’t expect them to be any different. The Russian collusion hoax is being unraveled before our eyes, its principal actors revealed, and Barack Obama is the main culprit. He has been referred to the Justice Department for possible charges on this subject.
Still, the Post was out there, saying “Tulsi Gabbard’s ‘seditious conspiracy’ claim is based on thin gruel.” Did they even read the declassified documents that point to Obama and his inner circle weaponizing intelligence to sell the Russian collusion narrative and then engaging in intentional, targeted media leaks to create chaos for the incoming Trump administration? It was done to destroy Donald Trump. If there’s no there-there, why is ex-CIA Director John Brennan facing possible perjury charges, or at the least, he should be. He claimed that the Steele Dossier, which included unverified and knowingly false documents, was essentially not part of their analysis. However, new documents show that he and then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper forced it into the report.
The thing that’s most offensive about the Russiagate Pulitzer is how many of the stories contained examples of one of the biggest journalistic sins - being bullshitted by your own sources https://t.co/McLcrKsxoo
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) July 24, 2025
There’s plenty left on the bone lol
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) July 24, 2025
Former contributing Rolling Stone editor Matt Taibbi took a blowtorch to The Washington Post, quipping “start your Pinocchios” before ripping the piece apart limb from limb. The three words that appear to irritate Taibbi to the max with this story appear to be “careful investigative work.” WaPo’s Glenn Kessler got taken to the cleaners here (via Racket):
Strictly speaking, “careful investigative work” isn’t a checkable phrase. It doesn’t contain a time or date, the length of an Ibex horn, even a pierceable superlative like “greatest economy in history.” But Kessler in the past has asserted the power to measure the mathematical velocity of human wrongness (“the Fact Checker database shows the dramatic escalation in the rate of Trump’s dishonesty over time…”), so we may as well take a whack. Did the intelligence community reach its fateful conclusion that Putin “aspired” to help Donald Trump, for whom he’d developed a “clear preference,” through “careful investigative work”?
Of course, Kessler when he wrote that line didn’t have the benefit of the just-released House Intelligence Committee report on the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment that’s at issue, but let’s review anyway…
We can forget that Kessler and everyone else at his paper has known for years that “careful” investigators like Comey, Brennan, and James Clapper included the “salacious and unverified” Steele Dossier in that 2017 Assessment; forget also that Kessler has neglected to mention the use of the dossier in that Assessment even after an annex containing it was declassified in 2020, leaving no doubt about its importance to the document; and even forget Kessler implied the two documents were separate, in a 2023 article bemoaning the damage Comey did to the “accurate Intelligence Community Assessment” by briefing Trump on “red herring” Steele material.
We can likewise forget Kessler and his paper have been consistently wrong about the Trump-Russia story, screwing every available pooch since this buffoonery started, including historically important mutts like the April 11, 2017 “FBI obtained FISA Warrant to monitor former Trump adviser” that reported there was “probable cause” to believe Carter Page was an “agent of a foreign power.” The Post will wash its hands of that mess by noting it was factually true that a FISA court approved such surveillance, but once upon a time it was supposed to matter to residents of Planet Fact that the FBI corrupted the process to get that warrant, and the man you identified as a foreign agent, wasn’t. But this is the Post, which won a Pulitzer Prize for stories like “FBI was to pay author of Trump dossier; Arrangement fell apart, but shows bureau found his inquiry credible,” omitting the minor detail that the FBI had fired Christopher Steele for lying and launched a worldwide search for corroboration destined to end in a single word: “Zero.”
Taibbi then notes what was objected to in the Steele Dossier by other analysts, namely how Russia couldn’t care less who won the 2016 election. They had no preference, but thought Hillary Clinton would win, were fine with it, and felt they could work with her. There was no favoritism here. The dossier was included in the new Intelligence Community Assessment that Obama ordered to bolster the Russian collusion narrative peddled by liberal America. Then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and ex-CIA Director John Brennan forced it into the report:
The Assessment said Putin ordered his intelligence services to “help Trump’s chances of victory when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton,” and said he had been advised in the stretch run that Trump wouldn’t win absent an intervention of “remarkable” derogatory information. It would seem relevant to ask the question of how “possible” it was for Putin to discredit Clinton, and if he possessed “remarkable” derogatory information.
Putin did possess it. The Russian foreign service, or SVR, possessed a “trove of information” that had been “exfiltrated from US Government and think tank entities,” and included correspondence from the White House, the State Department, and members of Congress, among others.
We know Russians were in possession of American correspondence claiming Attorney General Loretta Lynch fed information to Hillary Clinton about her FBI investigation during the campaign. Was that info right? Credible? Confirmed? Who knows, but one of the craggiest faces on the Mt. Rushmore of Careful, James Comey, said he was worried enough about those documents to hurry his announcement wrapping up Clinton’s investigation.
Our government also had copies of this “trove,” which should have been helpful to the ICA authors, who needed to evaluate reports that Russia was deliberately “laying low” and “getting ready” to “shoot” after the election, when they supposedly expected Clinton to be president. However, the Assessment authors didn’t examine that trove. Why? “The Obama Administration denied ICA drafters access to this intelligence on grounds of Executive or Congressional privilege.”
So, was this really careful investigative work? No. Even those tasked with handling the intelligence were barred for obvious political reasons. Again, Clapper, Brennan, and their cronies took the “discarded carrot-ends” of this, that, and the other parts of the dossier to manufacture a narrative that didn’t exist. But the media took the leaks hook, line, and sinker. They ran with them and created this massive American mess. There are numerous annotations of senior analysts objecting to the inclusion of the dossier because it was rife with bad sourcing, and knowingly false information—there is no Russian consulate in Miami. Still, these clowns “all signed their name to a conclusion at least two of the report authors said was unsupportable, before riding off into the Virginia night, the dulcet tones of Rachel Maddow’s brayings in their ears,” wrote Taibbi. “Calling this sound intelligence is like giving the Titanic captain an Explorers Medal for finding the bottom of the effing Atlantic.”
Damn, Matt. But also, very true.
Well, the intel chiefs clearly perjured themselves, by claiming the Steele material was not in the ICA. At minimum, there’s that https://t.co/W2Tazj4HhG
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) July 24, 2025
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