The Washington Insider – Media Resistance, Who really runs the government?

The Washington Insider – Media Resistance Who really runs the government? September 12, 2018 Daniel Greenfield 27Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism

The oldest institution in Washington D.C. isn't the White House (1817), the Smithsonian Castle (1855) or the Old Ebtitt Grill (1856): it’s government insiders conspiring with friendly reporters against their rivals and superiors. Even when Washington D.C. was uninhabitable during the summer months, the telegraph wires still burned with smears, innuendos and leaks even with no one around to leak.

When the Washington press corps isn’t firing stupid questions at press secretaries, it’s lunching at places like the Old Ebtitt Grill while jotting down gossip, innuendo and talking points from government insiders. The only industry with a more incestuous media than Washington D.C. is some 2,700 miles away in Hollywood. But lately the forbidden affairs between reporters and insiders make Hollywood seem tame.

Take James Wolfe and New York Times reporter Ali Watkins, where the thirty year difference between the Senate Intelligence Committee security director and the 26-year-old Pulitzer nominee (the most disgraceful Pulitzer jorno who hadn’t actually colluded in Communist genocide) and his marriage didn’t obstruct trigger the scruples of media outlets getting the inside scoop between the sheets.

The New York Times verbally shrugged it off. “Their relationship played out in the insular world of Washington, where young, ambitious journalists compete for scoops while navigating relationships with powerful, often older, sources.” Or as Harvey Weinstein called it, business as usual.

The anonymous insider New York Times op-ed lays bare the farce that is the insider-media resistance swamp. “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,” the headline blared.

“Resistance” makes you think of guerrillas hiding in jungles, partisans shooting from behind brick walls, not a Washington D.C. insider lunching with a New York Times editor. Government bureaucrats sabotaging elected officials didn’t begin with President Trump. Every Republican president (and some Democrats) have faced the courageous resistance of careerists who occasionally switch from ordering overpriced office chairs at taxpayer expense to pursuing their personal and political agendas, also at taxpayer expense. Only under Trump would these professional cretins be compared to the Maquis.

The insider-media resistance legitimized Hillary Clinton opposition research as a basis for spying on Trump officials, it let Comey allegedly leak classified documents and a thousand other treacheries.

Say what you will about Antifa and leftists who dress up as giant private parts or characters from the only Hulu original show that anyone watches, at least their “resistance” puts them on line for a beating or a photo that will make them cringe at family reunions for two generations. And they really believe in something. That something may be evil, but to quote Walter Sobchak, “At least it’s an ethos.”

The Washington insider resistance is the pathetic work of colorless careerists whose ideology rarely runs deeper than their next job. Their leftism is the reflexive protective social coloration and goes no deeper than Comey or Mueller’s Republican credentials. Had President Trump not threatened to drain the swamp, they would have done only as much undermining of his administration to get them a date, a good story at the next cocktail party or a post-government gig. But then Trump threatened the way of life of men and women who would have been happy if the Soviet Union had won the Cold War as long as they were allowed to keep their job titles, their gym memberships and their endless lunches.

Why does this “resistance” resist? Why does every Washington D.C. insider have his own pet reporter?

The unglamorous truth is that beyond the marble and white stone, the Imperial City is a snake pit where government careerists, bureaucrats and political appointees, engage in constant intrigues. Success in D.C. has very little to do with performance and a great deal to do with contacts and publicity. Everyone important enough to get coverage starts cultivating reporters and anonymously planting stories that make him look good and everyone in his way look bad. That’s the social disease of Washington D.C.

Both the media and the insiders have escalated their usual abusive behavior, with the insiders leaking classified information, doing serious damage while boasting about being a “resistance”. But it’s not a dramatic break with the past. Instead it’s a corrupt illicit relationship turning even more corrupt.

The “anonymous” op-ed casts light on just how much of Washington D.C. is driven by an incestuous relationship between government insiders and the reporters who are supposed to cover them, but instead collude with them. The media shapes the policy consensus while the insiders shape the media. And policy gets made not by elected officials, but by an echo chamber of unelected officials, appointees and their media pals. This echo chamber defines the popular view inside and outside Washington D.C.

Normally elected officials colluding to undermine elected officials would be deemed a threat to democracy, but the echo chamber insists that they’re saving America from President Trump.

That’s the “resistance” of careerists looking to balance jobs in the Trump administration with future job opportunities. It’s the lifers who never leave Washington D.C. riding the revolving doors from government to lobbying and consultancies, and then back to government again, who change addresses and suburbs, but never stop playing their corrupt games and hate anyone who threatens them.

Some call them the “Deep State”, but like “Resistance”, it’s far too grand a name for small, petty people who would sell their sisters for a leg up, who claim to believe whatever is popular at any given moment.

The only thing that Washington D.C. insiders ever resist is reform. That, not the supposed suffering of illegal aliens, Muslim terrorists or whatever Dem victim group is hot this week, is what motivates them.

President Trump came from the real estate world to a medieval court with the semi-modern trappings of ubiquitous Blackberries and encrypted apps to connect leakers to New York Times reporters. He threatened to drain the swamp and reform the racket. And that threat bound the Washington D.C. insider and the Washington D.C. reporter closer together than ever around fighting a common enemy.

The insider-media connection is older than the White House and Old Ebtitt, old enough that its members have come to think of Washington D.C. as their own, and of Trump as a parvenu, an upstart threatening to reform them out of existence just because he happened to have won an election.

Elections, the D.C. lifers know, come and go. Corrupt relationships however are forever.

The media is an integral part of the Washington D.C. swamp. The relationships that insiders cultivate with reporters are an important weapon in staving off reforms. The idealistic politician who starts talking reform quickly gets distracted by a thousand crises manufactured by threatened D.C. lifers.

That’s why the media has been so sharply paranoid about the loss of its privileges. Cutting back press conferences, opening them up or criticizing the media were all deemed a threat to the First Amendment. It’s not just about hating President Trump and his politics. The media depends on its network of contacts. Any threat to its contacts is a threat to the careers of influential reporters.

When a New York Times journalist is prepared to allegedly sleep for scoops with the knowledge of her superiors, imagine what sort of lies, smears and attacks the media will unleash to protect its sources.

The anonymous op-ed is the tip of the iceberg. The swamp dwellers like the slime too much. And they will do whatever they can to stop elections from overturning their powers and privileges.

Obama’s self-adoration “comeback” speech the other day was crammed with revisionism.

Valerie musta burned the midnight oil trying to paper over Obama’s most egregious acts.

The most jaw-dropping contention was backtracking his record on free speech:
“I complained plenty about Fox News,” St Obama explained, “but you never heard me threaten to shut them down, or call them ‘enemies of the people.’”

N-o-o-o-o, he didnt do that....he just unleashed the full force of the DOJ, in the person of AG Eric Holder, to pounce on Fox reporter James Rosen ......AND to intimidate Rosen’s family.

Holder and Obama issued a court order for Fox News reporter James Rosen’s emails, labeling Rosen a criminal “co-conspirator” under The Espionage Act.

theguardian.com Circa 2013

The Justice Department did more than seize a Fox News reporter’s emails while suggesting he was a criminal “co-conspirator” in a leak case — it did so under one of the most serious wartime laws in America, the Espionage Act. It is now well known that the Obama justice department has prosecuted more government leakers under the 1917 Espionage Act than all prior administrations combined - in fact, double the number of all such prior prosecutions. But as last week’s controversy over the Obama DOJ’s pursuit of the phone records of AP reporters illustrated, this obsessive fixation in defense of secrecy also targets, and severely damages, journalists specifically and the news-gathering process in general.

New revelations emerged yesterday in the Washington Post that are perhaps the most extreme yet when it comes to the DOJ’s attacks on press freedoms. It involves the prosecution of State Department adviser Stephen Kim, a naturalized citizen from South Korea who was indicted in 2009 for allegedly telling Fox News’ chief Washington correspondent, James Rosen, that US intelligence believed North Korea would respond to additional UN sanctions with more nuclear tests - something Rosen then reported. Kim did not obtain unauthorized access to classified information, nor steal documents, nor sell secrets, nor pass them to an enemy of the US. Instead, the DOJ alleges that he merely communicated this innocuous information to a journalist - something done every day in Washington - and, for that, this arms expert and long-time government employee faces more than a decade in prison for “espionage”.

The focus of the Post’s report yesterday is that the DOJ’s surveillance of Rosen, the reporter, extended far beyond even what they did to AP reporters. The FBI tracked Rosen’s movements in and out of the State Department, traced the timing of his calls, and - most amazingly - obtained a search warrant to read two days worth of his emails, as well as all of his emails with Kim. In this case, said the Post, “investigators did more than obtain telephone records of a working journalist suspected of receiving the secret material.” It added that “court documents in the Kim case reveal how deeply investigators explored the private communications of a working journalist”.

But what makes this revelation particularly disturbing is that Obama’s DOJ, in order to get this search warrant, insisted that Fox’s Rosen - a journalist - committed serious crimes. The DOJ specifically argued that by encouraging his source to disclose classified information - something investigative journalists do every day - Rosen himself broke the law. Describing an affidavit from FBI agent Reginald Reyes filed by the DOJ, the Post reports [emphasis added]:

“Reyes wrote that there was evidence Rosen had broken the law, ‘at the very least, either as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator’. That fact distinguishes his case from the probe of the AP, in which the news organization is not the likely target. Using italics for emphasis, Reyes explained how Rosen allegedly used a ‘covert communications plan’ and quoted from an e-mail exchange between Rosen and Kim that seems to describe a secret system for passing along information. . . .

However, it remains an open question whether it’s ever illegal, given the First Amendment’s protection of press freedom, for a reporter to solicit information.

No reporter, including Rosen, has been prosecuted for doing so.”

Under US law, it is not illegal to publish classified information. That fact, along with the First Amendment’s guarantee of press freedoms, is what has prevented the US government from ever prosecuting journalists for reporting on what the US government does in secret. This newfound theory of the Obama DOJ - that a journalist can be guilty of crimes for “soliciting” the disclosure of classified information - is a means for circumventing those safeguards and criminalizing the act of investigative journalism itself.

These latest revelations show that this is not just a theory but one put into practice, b/c the Obama DOJ submitted court documents accusing a journalist of committing crimes by doing this.—SNIP—

“Their relationship played out in the insular world of Washington, where young, ambitious journalists compete for scoops while navigating relationships with powerful, often older, sources.” Or as Harvey Weinstein called it, business as usual.

Maybe Bob Woodward can write a book on the journalist sluts, whores and butt boys of Washington DC??? Come on Bob, break out of your kiss Democrat butt mold... we'd like to know the truth and we'll buy the book.

Hello Washington Post and New York Times... Hey Maureen Dowd - defend the 'me too' women of the New York Times...

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