How the late stage coverage of the Mueller investigation of Russian election interference demonstrates that even the semblance of objectivity has been abandoned by the Prestige Media.
No better time exists than today to show the disparity of American perception concerning the concept of Presumption of Innocence. It is one of the foundation stones of the American criminal justice system, and it basically serves as a check on the power of the judiciary to incarcerate people without proof of wrongdoing and exhausting all of their legal rights. The disparity in perception varies between those that have read the evidence and recognize that with the passage of time the personal culpability of Donald Trump gets increasingly doubtful, and on the other side representatives of the Fourth Estate, media conglomerates and their pathetic offshoots and wannabes that continue to bay and plead for "more investigation" and impeachment.
The "victims" in the phenomenon that I am examining are not socially defenseless street urchins, but rather political leaders whose main transgression is contradicting the agenda of the conventional media. So the injury is not to their personal health but more to their reputation and financial well being. And for those of you that think it only covers President Trump, do not be fooled as to think that another mold breaking leader of a totally different vein such as Bernie Sanders or Ralph Nader would not be subject to similar pressures if he did not bend knee to the press lords. Oh no, make no mistake that when needed the presstitutes will go hard and accuse anyone they disagree with of being a Russian agent, a Putin pawn, or any other pathetic insult that is based on prejudicial hype and not on evidence. Let's examine the case of one such journalist whose "work" since the election has coloured the perspectives of NBC News' San Diego affiliate, POLITICO and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow.
Bernie's jelly vertebrae
Indeed, since the 2016 election, Sanders himself has curiously decided to forego his once-treasured maverick status on matters concerning foreign policy with Russia and is now fully on board with the pathetic yellow journalism feeding frenzy about Russian "collusion" during the 2016 presidential election. In this May 17, 2017 episode of his personal podcast Sanders claims that there is an "avalanche of information" regarding Trump's relationship with Russia.
To demonstrate just how flexible of a spine he has, Sanders was on February 16, 2018 unwilling to directly discuss revelations that his campaign may have been "boosted" based on the indictment of 13 Russian nationals involved in a troll farm during the election (POLITICO). Then on February 21 in response to criticism of his official statement, a rider was attached to it claiming that his aide had reported suspicious anti-Hillary activity to the Hillary Clinton campaign. That same day the same POLITICO reporter, Edward-Isaac Dovere, who appears to be MIG-welded (get it - MIG/MiGs Russia? No? Too nerdy?) to Sanders' mushroom cloud scalp decided that Sanders' and political adviser Jeff Weaver's responses to the indictments were too insolent in questioning why Hillary Clinton's campaign had done virtually nothing to combat "Russian interference" notwithstanding their being much more informed of it than he was.
On February 24, POLITICO's Dovere pounced and claimed that because Sanders' aide had acted in September 2016 of his own volition and not at the behest of Sanders himself, the Vermont senator was implicitly lying about his campaign having dealt with the "Russian interference".
What both Dovere and Sanders were referring to was the work of a San Diego-area activist journalist named John Mattes. What is important to note is that regardless of his past work for Sanders Mattes since 2016 has developed into a full-blown McCarthyist attention seeker. If one goes to Mattes' site, they would find some interesting information on investigations into the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s as well as the Lost Army Commandos (South Vietnamese CIA operatives imprisoned in the aftermath of the Vietnam War) that show that at one point he was involved in some great journalistic work. He even sued the CIA and Defense Department on behalf of the commandos.
The Talented Mr. Mattes
'Photo of Mattes from an audio lecture shared on YouTube by the Times of San Diego.
However, since then he has gone from being a truth crusader into the realm of full-blown Kurt Eichenwald meltdown territory. On January 20 he made an implication on Twitter that Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) could be a Russian "fellow traveller" (non-ideological colluder) due to the fact that he interacted with one of the suspected troll posts on Facebook. Also in January he latched onto the hilarious and irrelevant theory that Russia helped fund the NRA ahead of the 2016 election. Then there's sharing of a Politicus USA piece on "Alice Donovan" calling her without proof a "Russian agent". But a search of Alice Donovan on the web only reveals a claimed association with AnCap journalist Luke Rudkowski and a number of stories published by far-left media outlet Counterpunch. None of Donovan's articles were directly related to Russia, nor the 2016 election. Only one article was published by Counterpunch in 2016 by Donovan, and it was about cyber-attacks on medical databases. More importantly, most of her content on that site happened in 2017. So while she may well have been a Russian troll working to infiltrate American media, it has yet to be explained exactly why this was relevant to the outcome of the 2016 election.
Mattes derives some of his legitimacy for speaking as a Sanders supporter from claimed status as a grassroots San Diego area organizer for the senator's campaign, and on his having been an administrator of a couple of Facebook groups in the Greater San Diego area. Yet the extent of his involvement in both of those groups "San Diego Berniecrats" and "San Diego Progressive Democratic Club" does not appear to have been earlier than October 14, 2016 which was long after Sanders had already pulled out of the race. This could be because he has since been expelled from those groups and some of his posts have been removed. Or it could be that while he at one point was an activist on the Sanders 2016 campaign, Mattes was never intimately involved with the pro-Bernie groups that he claims were infiltrated and has crafted a story out of thin air.
At this point we should all ask the following questions concerning Mattes' claims and their relevance in 2018:
It's September 2016, and Sanders' campaign is long over and the daily management of it has gone into total hibernation. What possible responsibility does the elderly Vermonter have to monitor the campaign's Facebook pages for "Russian interference"?
Now also consider the fact that Mattes' claims relate NOT to Sanders' official campaign social media arms but to Facebook groups over which he has literally no control or oversight. Even given that some of the Macedonian or Albanian trolls became members of such groups, why would this have been the concern of either Sanders himself or his official representatives like Jeff Weaver?
The groups in question in Mattes' allegations were centered in San Diego, California. The Clinton campaign won California by a 61%-31% margin over Donald Trump, which exceeded all but one poll running up to the election. Therefore, how can Mattes based on this limited sample group reach any conclusion regarding Russian infiltration of the Bernie Bro groups?
Sanders' remarks in response to prodding by Chuck Todd on NBC's "Meet the Press" were made in response to hearing that a staff member from San Diego had notified the Clinton campaign of the Russian "infiltration". Yet in Dovere's follow-up February 24 piece in POLITICO Mattes states that he passed his findings on not to the Hillary for America campaign, but to David Brock's Super PAC American Bridge 21st Century.
In Dovere's Feb. 24 piece, John Mattes indicates that he did not know that contacting a Super PAC was not the same as contacting the official Clinton-Kaine campaign. This is his statement as a veteran lawyer and journalist.
Mattes refused to disclose on the record the name of the American Bridge official with whom he was in contact, nor a "senior Obama Administration" national security official that he claims to have also contacted. Rather he bases his entire case on his own self-identification as an administrator for a couple San Diego area Facebook forums.
What Mattes does not mention was that he was ousted from the same groups later due to his aggressive promotion of these theories that other members found preposterous and insulting. On March 21, 2017, Rachel Maddow aired a segment called "Russia Continues Info-War Tactics in US". This included a screenshot of one of the Bernie group pages that doxed the name of a Bernie Sanders who was feuding with Mattes.
Screenshot of Rachel Maddow broadcast where John Mattes doxed a feuding member of one of the Bernie groups he claimed to administer. (MSNBC)
It appears that by January 2017 Mattes' public involvement in this group ends as there are no posts from him thereafter.
The last known activity by John Mattes on one of the pages he claimed to administer ends in January 2017. In March other members demand answers for his statements to the media.
In a March 24, 2017 talk shared by the metro-focused Times of San Diego, Mattes makes the bombastic statement that his friends from the group were dupes even as several members of those groups were demanding on that page that he back up his claims to being an administrator of their groups. It appears that Mattes was willing to take his story to the larger media regardless of the veracity of its allegations and the absence of proof that the "infiltration" was of any consequence in San Diego.
The Russiagate desperation
The attention that Mattes received from NBC San Diego, POLITICO, and MSNBC was not due to a sufficient burden of proof but rather a desire to turn the screws on Bernie Sanders and prevent him from defending the integrity of his campaign from dubious claims of having been "infiltrated" by Russian agents. The only reason that the media even cared about a possible relationship with Russia on Bernie's part was a desire to corral progressives that were rendered cynical by the treatment of the Sanders campaign by the Democratic National Committee that have vowed not to go along with the party leadership any longer. This is exactly the type of sentiment expressed by Mattes himself in this Aug. 4, 2016 tweet in which he attacks Jill Stein and alleges she is trying to get Trump elected. Such character attacks are ridiculed by many of the dissident progressive left (aka Bernie Bros) as "sheep dogging".
What is even more baffling is that Mattes, a practicing attorney as well as a journalist, purported to believe that by sharing his information in 2016 with a David Brock-managed Super PAC he was properly dealing with his concerns. For those that are not aware, Brock has a long history of personal attacks on Bernie Sanders on behalf of the Clinton 2016 campaign, and was one of the most bitter critics of the Vermont senator during the primaries. The enmity between Brock and Sanders' camp was so strong that in December 2016 Bernie lieutenant Jeff Weaver penned a piece in The Hill where he responded directly to Brock blaming the election loss on Bernie Bros and claimed that he was engaged in "mudslinging" and "gutter politics".
And what of Sanders own opinion of Brock? He said in a May 2016 interview with Time that Brock was the "scum of the Earth". So why would a Sanders loyalist and "grassroots activist" as Mattes claims to be bring his research to David Brock? None of these nuances are borne out by Dovere's reporting in Politico, the NBC San Diego interview with Mattes, or the MSNBC segment by Maddow.
If one actually examines Mattes' actions and his "findings" they show the workings of a person who has completely abandoned the principle of presumption of innocence, even to the point of smearing the members of the Sanders-supporting community from which he claims to come. Someone who reads or watches any of these pieces of media would be led to believe that Sanders was being duplicitous about infiltration into his campaign, and that local supporters from California were willing co-conspirators in an international cabal to steal the election.
Link to Original article: https://hardnews.network/mueller-probe-over-commitment-may-soon-demand-commitment-to-mental-institutions/