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| Home Front: Politix |
| Kimberly Strassel WSJ: Dumpster Diving for Dossiers |
| 2017-01-14 |
| [WSJ] Washington and the press corps are feuding over the Trump "dossier," screaming about what counts as "fake news." The pity is that this has turned into a story about media ethics. The far better subject is the origin of the dossier itself. "Fake news" doesn’t come from nowhere. It’s created by people with an agenda. This dossier--which alleges that Donald Trump has deep backing from Russia--is a turbocharged example of the smear strategy that the left has been ramping up for a decade. Team Trump needs to put the scandal in that context so that it can get to governing and better defuse the next such attack. The more that progressives have failed to win political arguments, the more they have turned to underhanded tactics to shut down their political opponents. (For a complete account of these abuses, see my book, "The Intimidation Game.") Liberals co-opted the IRS to crack down on Tea Party groups. They used state prosecutors to launch phony investigations. They coordinated liberal shock troops to threaten corporations. And they--important for today’s hysteria--routinely employed outside dirt diggers to engage in character assassination. This editorial page ran a series in 2012 about one such attack, on Frank VanderSloot. In 2011 the Idaho businessman gave $1 million to a super PAC supporting Mitt Romney. The following spring, the Obama re-election campaign publicly smeared Mr. VanderSloot (and seven other Romney donors) as "wealthy individuals with less-than-reputable records." This national shaming, by the president no less, painted a giant target on Mr. VanderSloot’s back. The liberal media slandered him daily on TV and in print. The federal bureaucracy went after him: He was ultimately audited by the IRS and the Labor Department. About a week after the Obama attack, an investigator contacted a courthouse in Idaho Falls demanding documents dealing with Mr. VanderSloot’s divorces, as well as any other litigation involving him. We traced this investigator to an opposition-research chop shop called Fusion GPS. Fusion is run by a former Wall Street Journal reporter, Glenn Simpson. When we asked how he could justify dumpster-diving into the divorce records of private citizens, he said only that Mr. VanderSloot was a "legitimate" target. He refused to tell us who’d paid him to do this slumming, and federal records didn’t show any payments to Fusion from prominent Democratic groups or campaigns. The money may well have been washed through third-party groups. Why does this matter? Guess who is behind that dossier against Mr. Trump: Fusion GPS. A Republican donor who opposed Mr. Trump during the primaries hired Fusion to create a file on "the real estate magnate’s past scandals and weaknesses," according to the New York Times. After Mr. Trump won the GOP race, that donor pulled the plug. Fusion then seamlessly made its product available to "new clients"--liberals supporting Hillary Clinton. Moreover, it stooped to lower tactics, hiring a former British spook to help tie Mr. Trump to the Russians. (Fusion GPS did not respond to a request for comment.) No media organization has so far been able to confirm a single allegation in the dossier. Given Fusion’s history and tactics, trying arguably isn’t worth the effort. Truth was never its purpose. The point of the dossier--as with the dredging into Mr. VanderSloot’s personal life, or the smearing of the Koch brothers, or Harry Reid’s false accusation that Mitt Romney didn’t pay taxes--was to gin up the ugliest, most scurrilous claims, and then trust the click-hungry media to disseminate them. No matter how false the allegations, the subject of the attack is required to respond, wasting precious time and losing credibility. Mr. Trump should be focused on his nominations, his policies, disentangling himself from his business. Instead his team is trying to disprove a negative and prevent the accusations, no matter how flimsy, from seeping into voters’ minds. Opposition research and false claims are an equal opportunity game. But it says something about the brass-knuckle approach of the left that it would go so far as to write a dossier suggesting that Mr. Trump is a Manchurian candidate--and then to foist that report into the hands of intelligence officials. Mr. Trump can expect plenty more of this to come. In winning the election, he blocked the left’s ability to use some of its favorite intimidation tactics. It no longer controls an accommodating federal bureaucracy. It no longer runs a Justice Department willing to threaten political opponents and turn a blind eye to liberal abuse. So the left will increasingly rely on campaigns of delegitimization designed to force opponents onto a back foot, push them off task, or even bully them out of the public arena. In the absence of a winning policy argument, this is, in their minds, the best they’ve got. Republicans had better be ready for it. Write to kim@wsj.com. |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #3 In this case they have. Question is, is this case the tipping point? |
| Posted by: Fred 2017-01-14 21:23 |
| #2 #1 - I agree |
| Posted by: Frank G 2017-01-14 20:56 |
| #1 I think these false claims have impacted the MSM more than Trump |
| Posted by: Bright Pebbles 2017-01-14 17:46 |