Looks like the media's stepped in the Russia poop again: Reports say Trump wasn't briefed on Afghan bounties

They never learn, do they? After two years of pushing the bogus “Trump/Russia collusion” narrative – only to be utterly humiliated when the whole thing was a complete fabrication – the media are far too invested in the idea of Donald Trump as Vladimir Putin’s stooge to resist coming back for more now.

That’s why, for the past several days, they’ve been wetting their pants about a supposed report that Russia paid a bounty to Afghan assassins to kill Americans – and that Trump knew!

This is like wanting desperately to believe in Bigfoot, only to have everyone you know sit you down and explain as calmly and rationally as they can that there ain’t no Bigfoot. Then, suddenly, you think you spot some strange brown fur out of the corner of your eye, and you think: I knew it!

You can’t see the truth because you’re utterly unwilling to. That’s how the media – at least some of them – have become with this Trump/Russia thing. Somehow, they just know it, Trump is in Putin’s back pocket. Somehow they’ll prove it! Oh, and Elvis is working at the Burger King in Kalamazoo too.

Yet the reason the media’s narrative is quickly falling apart here is that not even they have a consensus about this nonsense. There’s some serious question about whether the bounties were ever paid or even contemplated by the Russians, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that the U.S. intelligence community considered it a hard-to-credit story. Contrary to what the New York Times, the Washington Post and the AP are trying to tell you, the intelligence community did not consider the notion credible enough to tell the president about it:

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The official didn’t offer details, and the CIA and other agencies declined to comment. President Donald Trump and his own spokeswoman offered contradictory descriptions. Trump said in a tweet late Sunday that “Intel just reported to me that they did not find this info credible, and therefore did not report it to me” or to Vice President Mike Pence.

At a White House briefing Monday, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said “there was not a consensus” among the intelligence community about the information, which was first reported Friday by The New York Times. She added that there “are dissenting opinions” and that the intelligence “was not verified.” The deaths resulting from the Russian payments were first reported Sunday by The Washington Post.

McEnany’s comments are consistent with what multiple officials told NBC News: that there is intelligence about Russians’ offering a bounty to kill Americans but that officials disagree about the implications and significance of the plot. Two senior administration officials said the U.S. received “raw intelligence based on limited sourcing” suggesting that Russia was offering cash for deaths of U.S. troops and coalition forces in Afghanistan.

That’s from NBC. The same report is coming from Catherine Herridge of CBS:

DEVELOPING: A senior intel official tells @CBSNews the GRU/Taliban bounty allegations were not contained in the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) which is the highly classified, daily summary of national security issues delivered to the President, key cabinet secretaries + advisers..

— Catherine Herridge (@CBS_Herridge) June 28, 2020

So both NBC and CBS have sources that contradict whoever is talking to the Times, the Post and the AP. That means – wonder of wonders – whatever anonymous sources are feeding this stuff to the Times, the Post and the AP are lying.

Does that shock you? It certainly shouldn’t. There’s a reason it should be a very rare thing for the media to quote anonymous sources. People who aren’t authorized to talk about a given matter are, by definition, betraying someone. They’re either betraying the bosses who trusted them to keep information confidential, or they’re betraying the reporters they’re talking to by telling them things that are either untrue, misleading or exaggerated.

The media love sources who go behind their boss’s backs and blab things to them. But if that person would backstab his or her boss, why wouldn’t he or she backstab a reporter?

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This sounds like a classic case of some Deep State apparatchik seeing an opportunity to generate bad press for the president, and knowing full well that the Times, the Post and the AP would be willing and uncritical recipients of the bad information.

Meanwhile, we’ll give rare kudos to NBC and CBS for digging further and finding out the real story.

Once again, the mainstream media got enticed by a Trump/Russia narrative and ran with it sight unseen instead of checking it out. And once again, they look like fools. At least this time it took two days instead of two years to find out the whole thing was bogus.