2016 | XLV-22

For Fairness, Balance and Accuracy in News Reporting

It is becoming clear that the opposition to Donald Trump becoming president is not letting up. The latest effort is focused on the conspiracy theory that hackers,

working for the Russian government, seized emails and other documents from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and entities connected to the Republican National Committee, but only leaked those related to the DNC, in order to help Donald Trump win the presidency.

Remember the outrage in the media when Donald Trump refused to say that he would automatically accept the outcome of the election? During the third of three presidential debates between  Trump and Hillary Clinton, Fox News Channel’s Chris Wallace asked Trump if he would honor the results of the election if he lost.

“I will look at it at the time. I’m not looking at it now. What I’ve seen is so bad,” Trump replied. “What I’m saying is I will tell you at the time…I’ll keep you in suspense.”

Hillary responded, saying, “That’s horrifying…That’s not the

way our democracy works. We’ve been around 240 years. We’ve had free and fair elections and we’ve accepted the outcomes when we may not have liked them and that is what must be expected of anyone standing on a debate stage during a general election.” Media outrage echoed Hillary’s sentiments.

Late on the night of the election, into the morning of November 9, the Associated Press and the broadcast and cable networks all called the election for Trump. Hillary Clinton conceded, yet the left, who were so outraged by Trump’s position, are now the Election Results Deniers.

After the initial shock and hysteria of losing, the Democrats and their leftist allies in the media came roaring back. It was white supremacy, they claimed, along with fake news; the Electoral College; the news media; FBI Director James Comey; Peter Schweizer’s “Clinton Cash,” both the book and the documentary; WikiLeaks—and surely global warming must have figured in there somewhere. And of course, the Russians. They all conspired to rig the election in favor of Trump. Hillary apparently had nothing to do with her own defeat.

The fact that Hillary won by more than 2.5 million votes means that the Russians failed, if their goal was to help Trump win the most votes. Surely they didn’t expect that Trump would be the winner if he lost the popular vote by such a margin.

The Washington Post story that broke on December 9 was an effort to state definitively that not only did the Russians hack the DNC for their emails, but were specifically attempting to help Trump win. Yet when you dig deep into the article, and various other sources, you find that it is not so definitive after all.

For one thing, it says that White House officials wanted to publicly blame Moscow back in mid-September, but “worried that doing so unilaterally and without bipartisan congressional backing just weeks before the election would make Obama vulnerable to charges that he was using intelligence for political purposes.”

But doing it now fuels the movement to somehow deny Trump the presidency. Even if the electoral vote proceeds on schedule and without a hitch for the President-elect, this charge of Russian influence will haunt Trump’s presidency until he perhaps wins an even larger re-election victory four

AIM in the News

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Help Wanted: Newspapers Struggle to

Find Pro-Trump Columnists

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The CIA’s War on Trump

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By Roger Aronoff

The Election Results Deniers

2 June-B 2011

Editor’s Message

in the News

A twice-monthly newsletter published by Accuracy in Media, Inc.

Editor: Roger Aronoff

4350 East West Highway #555Bethesda, MD 20814202-364-4401 | www.aim.orgPlease remember AIM in your will.

Your LettersTo the Editor: The long and the short of it is that all these liberals and democrats (consider-able overlapping here) simply sound like childish, spoiled children and sore losers. And as my old wrestling coach once said: “Show me a sore loser and I’ll show you a loser.”C.R.

Please send Letters to the Editor to:Accuracy in MediaAttn: Letters to the Editor4350 East West Highway #555Bethesda, MD 20814or email to info@aim.org

Please keep your submissions to 50 wordsor less. Letters may be edited for length.

Accuracy in Media was cited in two recent articles, one at Vox and the other at The Huffington Post, in articles addressing the diversion-ary issue of “fake news.“

Vox wrote that the far-left Media Matters for America is mimicking AIM: “It, too is a left-wing copy-cat, mimicking media watchdog groups on the right such as Accu-racy in Media.”

Huffington Post wrote: “There are sites like Factcheck.org and the well-known Politifact.com, but there are also partisan sources like the conservative watchdog group Accuracy In Media, and the liberal FAIR.org which tend to af-�rm the point-of-view of their poli-tics rather than remain neutral.”

The truth of the matter is that unlike websites such as Politifact.com and FactCheck.org, not to mention NBC, MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS, The New York Times and The Washington Post, AIM is very transparent about its world view. But in calling ourselves Accuracy in Media, we are sticklers about getting our facts right. AIM was founded in 1969 as the �rst media watchdog organization because the media, even then, were liberal, while posing as neutral. Today it is that same “mainstream media” that is the real purveyor of fake news.

Dear Fellow Media Watchdogs: It’s been quite a year. I want to wish all of you a healthy, Happy

New Year, and hope you’ve had a wonderful Christmas and holi-day season. As we go to press, Donald Trump has just won again, collecting 304 electoral votes, with two faithless electors in Texas abandoning him—while Hillary Clinton was abandoned by five faithless electors in Washington state. It’s beginning to feel like Ground Hog Day. How many times can Hillary lose elections in one year? She lost on November 8, again during the recounts,

and now with the Electoral College having weighed in. And don’t forget 2008! This year has been a shocker to many. Few believed that Trump would win the Republican nomination, much less the presidency. The media, and the rest of the left-wing establishment, have collectively cracked up and lost their minds. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. After eight years of supporting Barack Obama’s presidency, they, and many Republicans and conservatives, were sure that Mrs. Clinton was in-evitably headed to the White House. But it wasn’t to be. Despite all of the talk about Trump’s outrageous behavior, his unwillingness to release his tax returns, his bankruptcies and his ties to Russia, the American people chose Trump. He lost the popular vote to Hillary, but the winner, according to our Constitution, is picked by the Electoral College, based on the outcomes of elections in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The effort to define why Trump won is a futile exercise. It is unknowable which factors had the most impact. And there were many to choose from. There were all of the failed policies of President Obama and Hillary; there was Benghazi, and Hillary’s emails, which as I’ve argued many times, was actually an issue of national security and the mishandling of classified material. The list goes on: illegal immigration, political correctness, her embrace of Black Lives Matter, her collusion with the Democratic National Committee to block Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) chances of winning the nomination. And that’s just on her side. Trump connected with a lot of people who hadn’t been voting at all. I believe that the best things he had going for him included a very flawed opponent, his position on America’s borders and illegal immigration, on his determination to identify and try to do something about radical Islam, his promise to repeal Obamacare, and his contempt for the media and willingness to call out their bias and dishonesty. His slogan, “Make American Great Again,” also struck a dynamic chord. While many people believed that Obama was a great man and an outstanding president, others believed that he was a disaster for this country. Many recognized the deceit and the scandals that were occurring daily on his watch, and the media’s deter-mination to cover for him and protect his legacy. The historians will have a field day with the year 2016. We will be here to continue giving you our perspective on the first draft of history. I enjoy getting your letters and emails. Please let me hear from you.•

For Accuracy in Media Roger Aronoff

2016 | XLV-22

June-B 2011 3

You couldn’t fault Donald J. Trump for concluding that the CIA is out to get him

even before he starts his presidency. Former CIA officials Michael Morell, Michael Hayden and Philip Mudd have all denounced him. Plus, former CIA operations officer Evan McMullin

ran against him as an independent presidential candidate.

Obama’s director of the CIA is John Brennan, who recently disclosed that he voted for the Communist Party (CPUSA) ticket when he was in college. He was hired by the CIA anyway and quickly rose through the ranks, even though the CPUSA was funded by

Moscow and known to provide cover for Soviet espionage activities.

The liberal media haven’t made Brennan’s disclosure into a scandal and didn’t call for any investigations of Obama’s CIA.

Clearly, having an “intelligence” connection doesn’t mean you are intelligent or have good judgment.

The CIA’s War on Trump

years from now. But there are problems with the Post’s

story. For one thing, the FBI doesn’t share the belief that there is proof of Russia specifically intending to help Trump. And there is the problem of James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), who had previously admitted lying to Congress about an NSA program. Just last month he told a different story about what the Intelligence Community (IC) had learned about the Russian hacks.

According to a recent report on Fox News: “In a letter Monday  to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., said, ‘On November 17, 2016 you told the Committee during an open hearing that the IC (Intelligence Community) lacked strong evidence connecting Russian government Cyber-attacks and Wikileaks disclosures.’ In response to a question from ranking Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff (CA), Clapper had said, ‘As far as the WikiLeaks connection, the evidence there is not as strong and we don’t have good insight into the sequencing of the releases or when the data may have been provided. We don’t have as good insight into that.’”

Reuters and others then reported that Clapper’s office “has not endorsed [the CIA’s] assessment because of a lack of conclusive evidence that Moscow intended to boost Trump over Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.”

CNN also reported that “the extent to which the Kremlin is tied to the hacks remains murky.” They added that “the hacks fit Russia’s M.O., but there’s still no smoking gun directly tying the Russian government to the theft of emails from the DNC and Clinton campaign manager John Podesta.”

In addition, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says that the material that they

released didn’t come from any Russian hacks, but rather from insiders who leaked the material to them.

As David Sanger, a reporter for The New York Times who is also working on this story, said of the Obama administration, “This is the most closed, control-freak administration I’ve ever covered.” This raises the question, is Obama investigating who leaked this story to the Post and the Times? It seems like the answer is no, suggesting that he is behind the leak as a way of politicizing the issue, and putting pressure on Trump.

Another issue is that it is really Hillary who has had a tight relationship with Russia, especially when she was Secretary

of State. She used that position as a cash cow for her family foundation. As we pointed out a few months ago, through Skolkovo and Uranium One, tens of millions of dollars flowed to the Clinton Foundation in return for incredible rewards for the Russians, including 20 percent of U.S. uranium reserves.

The information from WikiLeaks, wherever it came from originally, was extremely damning for the Democratic Party and for Hillary herself. WikiLeaks showed the coziness between the media and the Democrats, and how the DNC had its thumb on the scale to defeat her opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas showed how Hillary coordinated with the DNC, a super PAC, and various far-left activist groups to violently disrupt Trump rallies and blame it on Trump.

Is it really such a leap to not believe

the intelligence analysis coming from the Obama administration? In August we learned how the intelligence prepared for Obama by Central Command (CentCom) was politicized, in essence to tell the President what he wanted to hear about the progress in war against ISIS. What about Director Comey recommending no indictment for Hillary, just days after Attorney General Loretta Lynch met with former President Bill Clinton? What about their use of the IRS to harass many conservative groups opposed to Obama’s policies? We know they politicized the talking points that Susan Rice was given for her Sunday talk shows the weekend after the terrorist attacks in Benghazi, which killed four Americans, and which Obama and Hillary lied about for weeks.

The real issue now, which few are speaking about, is whether or not what we know now is enough to result in overturning the results of the election. On December 19, the electors are set to vote. There have been efforts to cajole, threaten, and otherwise influence the electors before they vote. The Clinton campaign has gotten behind that movement. If Trump fails to get enough votes that day, it could go to the House of Representatives in January. The election was five weeks ago, and nerves are as raw as they were on election night. There are about five weeks more until the inauguration, if we get that far.

The Jill Stein recounts have largely been a bust, but there is liable to be more legal action. We’re in uncharted waters, and figure to be for some time, while the world adjusts to the new realities.•

Roger Aronoff is the Editor of Accuracy in Media, and a member of the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi. He can be contacted at roger.aronoff@aim.org.

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2016 | XLV-22

By Cliff Kincaid

The information from WikiLeaks, wherever it came from originally, was extremely damning for the Democratic Party and for Hillary herself.

4 June-B 2011

Making “America First” is not a requirement for serving in the CIA and other intelligence agencies. You can have numerous skeletons in your closet and even be a transgender. If you have any doubts, consider reading the CIA’s “Diversity and Inclusion Strategy (2016-2019).” It is Brennan’s masterpiece.

The line-up of former CIA personnel opposing Trump sounds impressive, except when you consider the fact that the CIA has a habit of getting things wrong. The late Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a former vice-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, once declared that “for a quarter century, the CIA has been repeatedly wrong about the major political and economic questions entrusted to its analysis.” Moynihan had introduced a bill to abolish the CIA. The late Lt. Gen. William Odom, then-director of the National Security Agency (NSA), said the CIA should be disbanded.

Trump critic Michael Hayden, who served as director of both the NSA and CIA, was on a list of “former national security officials” from Republican administrations who announced they wouldn’t vote for Trump. He was once photographed at a gala with former CIA and NSA analyst Edward Snowden, who stole and released classified information and is now living in Russia. Hayden can’t be faulted personally for that betrayal. But Snowden and other spy cases have to be considered when judging the reliability of products from the intelligence community, especially when they are transmitted anonymously through the press.

Under the headline, “CIA Judgment On Russia Built On Swell Of Evidence,” The New York Times reports that “many believe” there is “overwhelming circumstantial evidence” that the Russians tried to help Trump. The paper said “the conclusion that Moscow ran an operation to help install the next president is one of the most consequential analyses by American spy agencies in years.”

Such analyses can mean nothing and can, in fact, divert the attention of elected officials from the truth. Trump calls the verdict on alleged Russian involvement in the election “ridiculous.” It would not be the first ridiculous work product from the intelligence community. The

CIA failed to predict the Soviet “collapse,” and then mistakenly assumed the collapse was real and not a strategic deception.

It is significant that The Washington Post, owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, broke the story about the CIA allegedly concluding that the Russians had somehow meddled in the U.S. elections by hacking into Democratic Party computers. The CIA has a $600 million contract with Amazon Web Services.

Former Post publisher Katharine Graham reportedly gave a speech in 1988 at the CIA headquarters, where she said, “We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things that the general public does not need to know and shouldn’t. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.”

If this was the case under Graham, the previous owner of the Post, how likely

is it that such a relationship continues under an owner of a company that does business with the CIA?

Interestingly, Amazon CEO Bezos plans to attend President-elect Donald Trump’s meeting of tech-industry executives in New York. Perhaps Trump will ask Bezos whether the Post is being manipulated by political partisans in the Intelligence Community.

Trump has tweeted, “Can you imagine if the election results were the opposite and WE tried to play the Russia/CIA card. It would be called conspiracy theory!” Or “fake news.”

In response to the CIA’s reported findings, the Trump transition office raised the matter of another mistake: “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.”

The discredited analysis concluding that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) is most closely

associated with former CIA director George Tenet. A Clinton holdover, Tenet had told President George W. Bush that finding WMD was a “slam dunk.” He was photographed giving an award to then-DIA intelligence analyst Ana Montes, who turned out to be a Castro spy. Again, Tenet is not personally responsible for this betrayal. But it is one of many spy cases that have corrupted the Intelligence Community.

President Bush’s problem was that he failed to clean house in the Intelligence Community before the war.

After he takes office, Trump should immediately clean house in the CIA and other intelligence agencies. But it may be the case that the charges being directed against him at the present time are designed to prevent just that. If Trump cleans house, he will be accused in the press of trying to purge intelligence officials with evidence of a Russian plot to elect Trump!

The American people have been saddled with an Intelligence Community that is full of what are called “insider spies.” The situation is so bad that a special paper has been published about a novel new way to deal with traitors. The idea is to provide a “safe refuge” and a secret process of “reconciliation” for them without threatening long prison terms or the death penalty. In this manner, the American people would hear nothing about spies being arrested and the damage they have done.

We know that the media picked sides in the presidential contest. Now we are seeing more evidence of how the CIA picked sides, to the point of engaging in what is an obvious effort to bring down the Trump presidency even before it begins.•

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism.

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2016 | XLV-22

Trump has tweeted, “Can you imagine if the election results were the opposite and WE tried to play the Russia/CIA card. It would be called conspiracy theory!” Or “fake news.”

June-B 2011 5

Isn’t it strange how the left suddenly finds the CIA to be a worthwhile organization now that it has been

turned into a weapon against Trump?We need congressional investigations

into the politicization of the CIA under John Brennan, whose claim to fame has been bringing sexual “diversity” to the agency. Perhaps he should have been doing his job, which is to defend the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Reuters reports, “The overseers of the U.S. intelligence community have not embraced a CIA assessment that Russian cyber attacks were aimed at helping Republican President-elect Donald Trump win the 2016 election, three American officials said on Monday.” Reuters reported that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (or ODNI) “does not dispute the CIA’s analysis of Russian hacking operations,” but “it has not endorsed their assessment because of a lack of conclusive evidence that Moscow intended to boost Trump.”

All of this flatly contradicts the fake news story in The New York Times that the CIA judgment on Russia was built on a “swell of evidence.” It is evidence not seen by other intelligence agencies and the FBI. Even the CBS Evening News reports that the “FBI has not concluded its investigation into this, but so far it is not siding with the CIA.”

Common sense tells you that Moscow was perfectly content to let Hillary win, and probably thought she would win. After all, Hillary sold out America to Moscow’s interests with a Russian reset that failed and opened the door to more Russian aggression. Her State Department also sold American uranium assets to Moscow. She was the perfect Russian dupe.

This whole discussion in the media about the Russians backing Trump is fake news.

The obvious conclusion is that Brennan is on a mission to overturn the election through propaganda and disinformation. This is not only the last gasp of sore losers but represents corruption of the intelligence process.

If the purpose of the Russian hacking was to undermine confidence in the

American democratic process, as some “experts” originally thought, Brennan’s CIA is doing a good job of that.

House Intelligence Commit-tee chairman Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) has sent a letter to James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, saying, “On November 17, 2016, you told the Committee during an open hearing that the IC [Intelligence Community] lacked strong evidence connecting Russian govemment cyber-attacks and WikiLeaks disclosures, testifying that ‘as far as the WikiLeaks connection, the evidence there is not as strong and we don’t have good insight into the sequencing of the releases or when the data may have been provided.’ According to new press reports, this is no longer the CIA’s position.”

The WikiLeaks disclosures, of course, involved hacked emails from the Clinton campaign.

The CIA position “changed” because Brennan saw an opportunity to use the controversy againt Trump. Nunes refers to the CIA’s “reported revision of information previously conveyed to this Committee.” Once again, we see evidence that the CIA is making things up.

There is no doubt that WikiLeaks has worked for the Russians. Julian Assange himself worked for the Russian propaganda channel RT. But that doesn’t constitute evidence that the emails were stolen by the Russians and given to WikiLeaks.

It now seems clear that the CIA is going far beyond what the evidence in its possession actually shows. This means that the original story in The Washington Post was based on misleading, if not false, information. That story was headlined, “Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House.”

In short, the Post was duped by Brennan’s CIA. This constitutes a case of the intelligence community using a major media organ to mislead the American people. Since Post owner Jeff Bezos does business with the CIA, this is a matter of utmost concern.

In a statement, Nunes said, “Russia’s

cyber-attacks are no surprise to the House Intelligence Committee, which has been closely monitoring Russia’s belligerence for years—as I’ve said many times, the Intelligence Community has repeatedly failed to anticipate Putin’s hostile actions. Unfortunately the Obama administration, dedicated to delusions of ‘resetting’ relations with Russia, ignored pleas by numerous Intelligence Committee members to take more forceful action against the Kremlin’s aggression. It appears, however, that after eight years the administration has suddenly awoken to the threat.”

Obama’s CIA director “woke up” because it was politically convenient for him to do so. He’s trying to exploit the Russian cyber-attacks, which the CIA and other agencies failed to prevent, for political purposes.

Even more sensational than Brennan is former CIA official Michael Morell, who openly backed Hillary. He declared, “A foreign government messing around in our elections is, I think, an existential threat to our way of life. To me, and this is to me not an overstatement, this is the political equivalent of 9/11.”

It seems clear at this point that the corruption in the media has spread to the CIA.

An investigation is certainly needed. It should be conducted into the various former and current CIA officials who have been using the agency and their associations with the agency to wage war against the duly-elected president of the United States.

It may turn out to be the case that the real government meddling in our elections has been from the Obama administration and its CIA.•

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism.

2016 | XLV-22

By Cli� KincaidCorrupt CIA Feeds Crooked Media

6 June-B 2011

With Donald Trump just 39 days away from being inaugurated as the

45th  president of the United States, newspapers are hanging out the “help wanted” sign as they struggle to find pro-Trump columnists to write for their editorial pages.

According to  The  Washington Post’s  Paul Farhi, traditionally Repub-lican-supporting newspapers like the Des Moines Register and the Arizona Republic are having as much trouble as their more liberal counterparts,  The Washington Post  and  New York Times, in locating writers willing to pen pro-Trump columns for their respective op-ed pages.

Farhi says the papers have conservative writers, but few if any of them are Trump supporters:

“We struggled to find voices that could advocate for Donald Trump’s ideas,’ said James Bennet, the Times’ editorial-page editor. ‘It was really unusual. It didn’t help that the conservative intelligentsia lined up against him.’ But Bennet says Trump’s campaign contributed to the imbalance: ‘He didn’t have the people around him who were prepared to put together his arguments’ for publication.

“Lynn Hicks, the  Des Moines Register’s opinion editor, found a parallel at his newspaper, the largest in the swing state that wound up going for Trump. ‘Given that almost all of our Republican leadership in Iowa supported Trump, I kept waiting for [supportive op-ed] pieces to arrive,’ Hicks said. ‘I’m still waiting.’”

USA Today  has bucked the trend, carrying columns by Instapundit founder

Glenn Reynolds, Trump running-mate Mike Pence and campaign surrogate Rudy Giuliani. But they are the exception rather than the rule.

This has left the papers in a bind, according to Farhi, since they try to present a rough balance between right and left opinions on their op-ed pages. Balance? Really?

They say karma is a—well you know what—and that seems to be biting the newspapers in their collective asses as their all-out effort to defeat Trump backfired miserably, leaving them with a stable of writers who are out of touch with the new reality that Trump will be the president, and that the old rules no longer apply.

That doesn’t mean that they won’t still try to  find pro-Trump columnists, according to Farhi:

“The Washington Post’s editorial-page editor, Fred Hiatt, said the paper is as committed ‘as ever’ to offering readers ‘a range of smart, independent thinking, and we are always thinking about whether there are new voices we should be adding’ as Trump takes office.

Said the Times’ Bennet: ‘We owe it to our readers to help them hear the voices that were supportive of Trump. .?.?. I’m proud of the work we did, but we could have done better.’”

Far better, as it turns out.•

Time  magazine announced that their Person of the Year for 2016 is President-elect Donald

Trump. That probably didn’t surprise anyone given Trump’s stunning—to the media—election victory. But the magazine didn’t bestow the honor on the next president without showing its own liberal bias by calling Trump the “President of the Divided States of America.”

Trump took issue with that characterization during an interview with  Today’s  Matt Lauer, right after the announcement was made.

“When you say ‘divided states of America,’ I didn’t divide them,” Trump said. “They’re divided now, there’s a lot of

division. And we’re going to put it back together.”

Actually, a number of polls have suggested that Barack Obama is, in fact, the most polarizing president in history.

Usually when a president is selected as the winner,  Time  refers to him as President or President-elect and refrains from other commentary. But Trump is apparently a special case who deserves some snark, reflecting their true feelings about him.

Time  had a golden opportunity to show some respect for Trump as he prepares to take office, but they just couldn’t resist taking a shot and exposing their bias for all to see.•

2016 | XLV-21

Time Magazine Shows Bias in Trump Person of

the Year Cover

By Don Irvine

AIM supporters with Don in L.A.

Help Wanted: Newspapers

Struggle to Find Pro- Trump Columnists

By Don Irvine

Don Irvine Chairman of

Accuracy in Media