What the Washington Post may have just given away about its upcoming Trump-Russia bombshell
For weeks I’ve been hearing the same rumors that you have: the Washington Post is supposedly sitting on a major bombshell story in Donald Trump’s Russia scandal, hesitant to publish it for fear of impeding the ongoing criminal investigation. I don’t know if those rumors are true or not. But the WaPo may have unwittingly given something away about its bombshell this week when it launched a bizarre and oddly specific left-field attack on Palmer Report. Hear me out.
This all started when Harvard published a study this week which proved that liberal news outlets were far more honest and accurate in their reporting during this past election cycle than conservative news outlets were. Among the many liberal news sites mentioned in the study was my former publication Daily News Bin. But it was all the way down at number fourteen on the liberal influence list, and while I’m proud of the impact I had, I’m little more than a footnote in this study. Then the WaPo decided to build an entire story around the Harvard study, whose crescendo was an unrelated attack on Palmer Report’s reporting in general, and on one of my stories in particular.
If you’re trying to figure out why the WaPo would go to all the trouble of plucking my fairly obscure former publication out of a Harvard study, and using it as an arbitrary excuse to make an oddly specific attack on something I reported in my current publication, so am I. But then a member of my own research team suggested I focus on what it was that the WaPo was specifically attacking me for, because it was such an odd and self defeating example on the WaPo’s part.
When the Washington Post used its article about a Harvard study as an excuse to attack Palmer Report for what it cartoonishly described as making “wild and unsubstantiated claims,” it only cited one example: my reporting on Mitch McConnell having taken campaign money from Russia. This was surreal, considering that the Dallas Morning News (link) has since confirmed and vindicated what I reported on McConnell, and in fact there are records that prove he took the money. So why on earth would the WaPo bend over backward to invent an excuse to attack me, and then only attack me for a story that it knows I’ve already been vindicated on?
And that makes me wonder if this was a case of the Washington Post trying to protect its own pending story. Perhaps the WaPo has been sitting on a story involving McConnell and Trump-connected Russian money that goes much deeper than what Palmer Report or the Dallas Morning News reported. Maybe it’s so concerned about preserving the “exclusive” nature of its story that it’s become desperate enough to play offense against anyone who’s already reported pieces of it.
The response from the WaPo, after it was exposed as having inaccurately attacked me, was even more surreal. WaPo editor Natalie Jennings informed me that she was willing to correct her writer’s false claim that Daily News Bin is Palmer Report, but that she was unwilling to correct the part that falsely claimed my reporting on McConnell was unsubstantiated. Why? In her words, that part was just a “matter of opinion.” Huh? Come on. Editors of major newspapers don’t act this stupidly, refusing to correct one of their own factually disproven claims and offering such a laugh-out-loud excuse for it, even in the face of what could be a major libel lawsuit from me if I wanted to go there. And yet as unreal as this sounds, I have the email from her.
If this isn’t some kind of strategic attempt at protecting the exclusivity of its own impending story about McConnell, then we’re looking at something even more bizarre. In such case you’d have to believe that the Washington Post bent over backward to invent an attack piece on little old me, and was lazy and incompetent enough to only offer one supposed example of my work without realizing that it was something I’ve already been vindicated on, and then refused to correct it for literally no reason. In other words, is the Washington Post being run by Tom Clancy, or is it being run by a Scooby Doo villain?
