FROM EIR DAILY ALERT
‘Fool Me Once’... The Strange Tale of BuzzFeed and the Integrity Initiative
Jan. 19, 2019 (EIRNS)—On Jan. 18, BuzzFeed published a “bombshell” story that Donald Trump had ordered his former lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about the Trump Tower project in Moscow. They sourced it to two anonymous FBI agents who claimed to be completely familiar with what Special Counsel Robert Mueller had on this. Saturday, the Democratic Party and its media appendages in the United States collectively went crazy, hyperventilating (while attempting outright seriousness and pomposity): “Now we are definitely in impeachment territory.” They proclaimed the President’s impeachment imminent due to the BuzzFeed bombshell well over 200 times on U.S. outlets. The only problem was that the BuzzFeed bombshell was so fake that it even drew an unprecedented rebuttal from Special Counsel Robert Mueller. He stated publicly that BuzzFeed’s claims were not accurate.
There is the saying, traced to the Italians, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” BuzzFeed was chosen, somehow, by the highest levels of British intelligence and its lackeys here, to fully publish the Christopher Steele dirty dossier about Donald Trump on January 10, 2017. It had been leaked to BuzzFeed by John McCain’s aide David Kramer, long associated with the National Endowment for Democracy and other British-associated intelligence and regime-change operations in the United States. There followed a flurry of articles pumping Steele’s credibility and that of the dossier by various reporters and officials who have since been linked to the Integrity Initiative, the British military’s psywar and info war apparatus now working with the U.S. State Department. The Integrity Initiative itself lists BuzzFeed as a “friendly publication” to its anti-Russian, any dissent, information warfare and censorship campaign, noting that BuzzFeed allows publication of the Initiative’s anonymously sourced materials. The Initiative references planned meetings with BuzzFeed for purposes of complete integration and “strengthening” the bonds.
The early 2017 “vouching for Christopher Steele’s bona fides” campaign aimed at overcoming the stench from what was, on its face, an easily discernible, sloppy British intelligence hoax, included the former British Ambassador to Russia Sir Andrew Wood, a bigwig in the Integrity Initiative and with Christopher Steele. Wood initiated the Steele-McCain-Kramer leak. It also included Luke Harding of the Guardian, and Michael Weiss of the Daily Beast and The Interpreter, which is the journal of the Institute of Modern Russia. A major piece in this campaign was authored by Howard Blum for Vanity Fair. As opposed to the others, Blum has yet to be directly linked to the Integrity Institute. Some will remember him, however, as a long-time New York Times defamer of Lyndon LaRouche. So, a British hit piece, which otherwise dwelled on a site famous for cat videos and other clickbait, became the “backbone” of Russiagate. Its widespread introduction to the American public was timed to go with Donald Trump’s election, introducing the trope that Trump was a Manchurian candidate who engaged in perverse sexual acts in Moscow.
On Friday, Jan. 18, BuzzFeed, the Integrity Institute’s friendly publication, tried to up the impeach-Trump ante with the fake Michael Cohen story. Like the Steele Dossier, the BuzzFeed claims about Cohen stunk to anyone with minimum intelligence. If Mueller had the information BuzzFeed said he had, he would surely have included it in Michael Cohen’s indictment and plea deal. It was probably thought Mueller would stay silent as the media storm accelerated, as he has, so reliably in the past. One of the authors of the fake story, Jason Leopold, has used exactly the same scenario in the past, alleged reliance on “two FBI agents with knowledge of the investigation.” Previously, he relied on two FBI agents, cited anonymously, during the Valerie Plame scandal, to report that Karl Rove was to be indicted imminently. The “two” FBI sources did him no better back then. The Rove indictment never happened, nor was it ever planned. Leopold was fired from Salon for plagiarism, is a convicted felon and a former cocaine addict. BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith describes BuzzFeed’s practice as posting first what people are otherwise seeing on the Internet and correcting any errors through the social media mechanism of Twitter complaints. The Columbia Journalism Review’s discussion of BuzzFeed is headlined, “Who Cares If It’s True?” Think about these widely known facts when reviewing the sanity of the Democratic Party officials who went to the ramparts Saturday over yet another piece of easily recognizable crap.
