Do I need to start this post with a reminder that I voted for Hilary Clinton and that I consider Donald Trump a generally dispicable person with whom I rarely agree on an issue?

Michael Sussmann has been indicted. The New York Times reputed this true fact but merely indicated that it’s significance was limited, explaining that Sussman falsely told the FBI that he was not representing any client when he reported that there was a covert communications channel between Donald Time and Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked financial institution.

Compare the above NYT version of Sussmann’s indictment to Glenn Greenwald’s detailed analysis of the meaning and ramifications of Sussmann’s indictment. These two accounts are night and day. Greenwald connected the dots to demonstrate the long-term mendacity and complicity of the left-leaning legacy news media regarding the supposed Trump-Russia connection, as well as the inescapable conclusion that Hillary Clinton delivered four key lies only eight days before the election.

Greenwald’s story is one that he has told repeatedly, but this is yet more evidence showing how our news media is organized into two teams tethered to our two main political parties.  Here is the link to following Greenwald’s tweets on Twitter:

Greenwald has often lamented that reporters who make shit up are rarely punished. Much more often, they are promoted.

[Added Sept 24, 2021]

Matt Taibbi also comments on this journalistic malpractice:

Foer’s idea of checking the technical aspects of a story alleging secret communication between Trump and Russia involved sending a 2500-word chunk of his draft to Hillary Clinton’s own hired opposition researchers. Despite these excellent folks not being of “much help,” Foer was somehow able to run his story the next day. And we really wonder why people don’t trust the news media?

Here’s more from Taibbi  . . .

it is a reasonable inference that the Clinton campaign knew the FBI was not going to be told they were Sussmann’s client. If the campaign’s general counsel Elias was looped in to all of Sussmann’s activities, and all of these aforementioned people knew Sussmann had both gone to the press and to the FBI with this story, I defy any of them to provide an innocent explanation for their failure to disclose that the Clinton campaign was the source of the story once it was made public.

These people didn’t just keep quiet about that fact, but actively lied to the public about it. The deception went all the way up to Hillary Clinton herself, who tweeted about the original report from Foer in Slate. Hillary’s tweet, which is still up — this should tell people a lot — contains a lengthy statement from Sullivan.

There are at least two glaring deceptions in Sullivan’s statement. He says the alleged Trump-Russia link was “discovered” by journalists, when obviously it was the Clinton campaign that brought the bogus story to journalists. He also says “we can only assume that federal authorities will now explore this direct connection between Trump and Russia,” when the campaign of course didn’t need to “assume” anything, being fully aware that the FBI was already looking into the matter.

They’d pulled the same, “Shocked, shocked” routine after the release of the first public story sourced to Christopher Steele, the September 23 Yahoo! report by Michael Isikoff alleging a secret Trump-Russia backchannel, “Trump U.S. Officials Probe Ties Between Trump Adviser and Kremlin.” The Clinton-funded Steele, again by way of Perkins Coie and Fusion-GPS, were the real sources for the story claiming that former Trump aide Carter Page had met with a Russian official who was “believed by U.S. officials to have responsibility for intelligence collected by Russian agencies about the U.S. election.” However, right after the Yahoo! story came out, the Clinton campaign released a statement decrying the “bombshell” report about Trump’s “chilling” ties to the Kremlin, as if hearing it for the first time.

Taibbi is ahead of the curve on calling Russiagate “Watergate,” but his hard work in connecting the dots fully justifies this comparison:

Russiagate was a daisy-chain of deceptions. The Clinton campaign systematically planted phony stories about things like the Trump-Alfa business, the pee tape/blackmail tale, and Carter Page’s supposed role as a Trump-Russia conduit; the FBI went along with the fiction that inquiries launched on these matters did not originate as paid research from the Clinton campaign; and a parade of news media figures were culpable either as dupes or witting participants in these frauds, which in the case of the Alfa stunt was executed in a “hurry” to affect a presidential election.The only thing preventing all of this from being thought of as a scaled-up version of Watergate is the continued refusal of institutional America to own up to the comparison.