Why you’re not hearing more about Donald Trump’s privately hired spies
This weekend the British mainstream media exposed a scandal involving Donald Trump and his political team having using privately hired goons to try to dig up dirt on former Obama officials. For all of Trump’s many unethical and illegal scandals, this might be the ugliest. It’s also nearly a dead giveaway that Trump has been targeting his other adversaries with similar methods, because this isn’t the kind of line you only cross once. Yet as important as this new storyline is, I fully expect the American mainstream media to ignore it – at least for the next several months.
There’s little doubt as to the legitimacy of what’s being reported here. The Guardian has published a detailed expose into the entire operation, which saw Trump and his team privately hiring Israeli fraudsters to try to sabotage President Obama’s Iran deal by seeking dirt on the officials who negotiated it. The specter of a sitting U.S. President privately hiring foreigners to do this kind of work, when he had the U.S. intel community at his fingertips, is a dead giveaway that Trump and his people knew how unethical it was. But you’re not going to hear much more about it for awhile.
Why am I being so pessimistic on this? Because I’ve seen it before. The British media breaks a major Trump scandal wide open, and the American media decides it’s just not ready to go there. Part of the problem is that the American media would first have to reverse-engineer the story so it can use words like “exclusive” and “breaking news.” The other part of the problem is that the American media isn’t done milking its current favorite Trump narratives for ratings. Why waste time reporting on something as dry as Trump hiring foreign spies, when they’re in the midst of a ratings-friendly storyline about Trump and a porn star?
We saw this when the British mainstream media began exposing major chunks of the Trump-Russia scandal shortly after the election, and it took several months for the American mainstream media to finally show interest in it. The British long ago exposed the money pipeline from Russia to Deutsche Bank to Donald Trump. You still don’t hear much about that from the American media. The BBC reported more than a year ago that it had a CIA source confirming the Pee Pee Tape. Until recently, the American media was still making a point of pretending the Trump-Russia dossier was illegitimate.
I’d like to be wrong about this. And I’m sure you can google around and find at least some examples of American media outlets acknowledging what the Guardian just dug up about Donald Trump using privately hired goons to dig up dirt on people. But that’ll sadly probably fade within days, and then you simply won’t hear about it again until the American mainstream media decides the time is right to begin pushing that narrative for ratings.
