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Wow! Kurt Eichenwald thread about how he started covering Trump/Russia, & his foreign intel sources
Starting here:
Link to tweet
1. With each passing year, people gain a better understanding of what I was writing in my coverage of Trump-Russia before the election. This is the key story, and I am going to begin highlighting things folks now should be to understand far better...
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-vladimir-putin-russia-hillary-clinton-united-states-europe-516895
2...now, the quick criticism of American journalism before I begin. The general reaction from the rest of the press as I wrote these deeply reported stories was "Too crazy to be believed." Then they would return to another Hillary email story. But the information was all....
3...available if people just did the damn reporting. So, I will fill in a few blanks. In September, 2016, I heard through the intel grapevine that a FISA warrant application had been filed related to someone connected to the Trump campaign. (This was proved much later.) I...
4...started calling around and reached key intel sources. I asked "Trump campaign?" No one would answer. Not no comment, not a wave-off. No answer whatsoever. I had never experienced that before. I understood, however, that if the USA had information that would apply to....
5...a FISA warrant application for the Trump campaign, the information either could have come from a foreign intel service or have been shared with a foreign service. So I started contacting intel sources with foreign services.
And whooo-boy. What I heard. This is BEFORE the....
6...election. Our allies, and our partial allies who were enemies of Russia, were going berserk. They had heard endless amounts re: Putin, Trump, and they found Trump's behavior to be inexplicable. They concluded that Trump was either stupid, crazy, or a Russian asset by....
7...being compromised or something else. If you look at this paragraph from my big Russia story, you will see that our allied intel services had concluded that, in his pre-election actions with Trump, Putin had the goal of disrupting NATA, which is exactly what happened....
8...now the phrase there that for the reasons they had to explain Trumps behavior - the last one was "misleading the American public for unknown reasons." I could not write what they actually said, because they did not have enough basis for making a conclusion. But....
9....the "unknown reasons" were that Trump - through extortion, bribery or ideological reasons - was a Russian asset. This was later talked around by another source with British intel service. This person said below:.....
10...now here the person said "there certainly are a lot of conspiracy theories being bandied about." As you may realize, no reporter would let that go without asking. The answer: "That he's been compromised by the Russians." Now, they would not share any info with me to....
11...establish that they knew this. BUT - and here is the big but - NEVER have I received so much cooperation on a story from so many foreign intelligence services. It felt clear to me that they were dying to provide signals to the US that something untoward was going on. And....
12...the refusal even to no comment questions about the Trump campaign was unprecedented in my contact with anyone connected with American intel. In other words, nothing was normal in this. People were clearly unnerved by whatever they knew.
Now, as I was working on this....
13...I received my now-infamous call from an American intel person telling me to watch Sputnik that day, the Russian disinformation site. A falsified document shot through a twitter account that Mueller has identified as controlled by the Russians, was picked up from that....
14...account by Sputnik, and then was recited by Trump, all within the course of three hours. What this means is that, out of the 100s of billions of tweets a day, somehow the Trump campaign nabbed one from a Russian conspirator, or pulled it from a Russian disinformation site...
15...and then publicly recited the false document as fact. My article about this came out within two hours of Trump's recitation. Sputnik launched an attack on me, and almost immediately, the Trump campaign was emailing links to the Sputnik attack on me to the reporters....
16...covering the campaign. When I proved Trump had violated the Cuban embargo, the campaign stayed silent. When I revealed he was doing business with the son of an individual who was laundering money for the Iranian military, he stayed silent. When I exposed his enormous...
17...conflicts in his international dealings that would threaten national security if he was elected, he stayed silent. They ONLY went after me when I pointed out they had seized Russian disinformation, and they used an article in a Russian disinformation site to do it.....
18...the bottom line: Our allies don't trust him. Never have. They believe he is working in tandem with Putin for the purpose of tearing apart NATO. The evidence was all there to begin with. Maybe, rather than scoffing at real reporting, rather than writing that "the FBI found...
19...no links to Russia in Trump campaign" just a couple of weeks after the primary investigation began (I.E. - they COULDNT have reached a conclusion by that time), maybe if they had stopped obsessing about her emails, and do the reporting to find out what was going on....
20...around the world, we wouldn't be faced with daily "no kidding" surprises.
A final note: When Russiagate finally took off, Newsweek asked me to write stories matching what other outlets were saying. I pointed out - it was all in my original story. So, for the first time....
21...in my career, and perhaps for first time in Newsweeks history, to "catch up" to story, we reprinted what he had published so many months before, pointing out that this was all known pre-election.
Yah, bugs me. Reporters need to report, not conclude without reporting.
Done.
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-vladimir-putin-russia-hillary-clinton-united-states-europe-516895
2...now, the quick criticism of American journalism before I begin. The general reaction from the rest of the press as I wrote these deeply reported stories was "Too crazy to be believed." Then they would return to another Hillary email story. But the information was all....
3...available if people just did the damn reporting. So, I will fill in a few blanks. In September, 2016, I heard through the intel grapevine that a FISA warrant application had been filed related to someone connected to the Trump campaign. (This was proved much later.) I...
4...started calling around and reached key intel sources. I asked "Trump campaign?" No one would answer. Not no comment, not a wave-off. No answer whatsoever. I had never experienced that before. I understood, however, that if the USA had information that would apply to....
5...a FISA warrant application for the Trump campaign, the information either could have come from a foreign intel service or have been shared with a foreign service. So I started contacting intel sources with foreign services.
And whooo-boy. What I heard. This is BEFORE the....
6...election. Our allies, and our partial allies who were enemies of Russia, were going berserk. They had heard endless amounts re: Putin, Trump, and they found Trump's behavior to be inexplicable. They concluded that Trump was either stupid, crazy, or a Russian asset by....
7...being compromised or something else. If you look at this paragraph from my big Russia story, you will see that our allied intel services had concluded that, in his pre-election actions with Trump, Putin had the goal of disrupting NATA, which is exactly what happened....
8...now the phrase there that for the reasons they had to explain Trumps behavior - the last one was "misleading the American public for unknown reasons." I could not write what they actually said, because they did not have enough basis for making a conclusion. But....
9....the "unknown reasons" were that Trump - through extortion, bribery or ideological reasons - was a Russian asset. This was later talked around by another source with British intel service. This person said below:.....
10...now here the person said "there certainly are a lot of conspiracy theories being bandied about." As you may realize, no reporter would let that go without asking. The answer: "That he's been compromised by the Russians." Now, they would not share any info with me to....
11...establish that they knew this. BUT - and here is the big but - NEVER have I received so much cooperation on a story from so many foreign intelligence services. It felt clear to me that they were dying to provide signals to the US that something untoward was going on. And....
12...the refusal even to no comment questions about the Trump campaign was unprecedented in my contact with anyone connected with American intel. In other words, nothing was normal in this. People were clearly unnerved by whatever they knew.
Now, as I was working on this....
13...I received my now-infamous call from an American intel person telling me to watch Sputnik that day, the Russian disinformation site. A falsified document shot through a twitter account that Mueller has identified as controlled by the Russians, was picked up from that....
14...account by Sputnik, and then was recited by Trump, all within the course of three hours. What this means is that, out of the 100s of billions of tweets a day, somehow the Trump campaign nabbed one from a Russian conspirator, or pulled it from a Russian disinformation site...
15...and then publicly recited the false document as fact. My article about this came out within two hours of Trump's recitation. Sputnik launched an attack on me, and almost immediately, the Trump campaign was emailing links to the Sputnik attack on me to the reporters....
16...covering the campaign. When I proved Trump had violated the Cuban embargo, the campaign stayed silent. When I revealed he was doing business with the son of an individual who was laundering money for the Iranian military, he stayed silent. When I exposed his enormous...
17...conflicts in his international dealings that would threaten national security if he was elected, he stayed silent. They ONLY went after me when I pointed out they had seized Russian disinformation, and they used an article in a Russian disinformation site to do it.....
18...the bottom line: Our allies don't trust him. Never have. They believe he is working in tandem with Putin for the purpose of tearing apart NATO. The evidence was all there to begin with. Maybe, rather than scoffing at real reporting, rather than writing that "the FBI found...
19...no links to Russia in Trump campaign" just a couple of weeks after the primary investigation began (I.E. - they COULDNT have reached a conclusion by that time), maybe if they had stopped obsessing about her emails, and do the reporting to find out what was going on....
20...around the world, we wouldn't be faced with daily "no kidding" surprises.
A final note: When Russiagate finally took off, Newsweek asked me to write stories matching what other outlets were saying. I pointed out - it was all in my original story. So, for the first time....
21...in my career, and perhaps for first time in Newsweeks history, to "catch up" to story, we reprinted what he had published so many months before, pointing out that this was all known pre-election.
Yah, bugs me. Reporters need to report, not conclude without reporting.
Done.
Eichenwald hasn't finished the thread yet. I'll continue adding to this as he adds more tweets.
Okay. Looks like he's finished the thread with that 21st tweet.
Editing again to add that Eichenwald posted an addendum later, which Rhiannon12866 linked to in her reply (reply 7) below.
43 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
I remember all of those articles and his timeline perfectly. The news kept on Hillary to keep the race close. It was the only thing they had on her, the old dead horse story that had nothing to do with the election, but they lead with it every chance they had to keep tRump in the race. And look what the M$M did! 
Great reporting Kurt!
Link to tweet
22....actually, an addendum. The foreign intel sources named three particular people they were most concerned about. Read em....from pre-election. Names familiar? pic.twitter.com/DORIz4ZKc0
9:35 PM - Jan 12, 2019
