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Why Last Year’s Trump-Russia Pulitzer Was No Prize

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By Tom Kuntz, Editor, RealClearInvestigations
April 11, 2019

What a difference a year makes. With the announcement of the 2019 Pulitzer Prizes set for next Monday, last year's award to the New York Times and Washington Post for Trump-Russia coverage is already looking like a crumpled first draft of history lofting in a high arc to the dustbin. It's eclipsed by the double-whammy of the Special Counsel’s finding of no collusion with the Kremlin and Attorney General William Barr's disclosure this week that he'll investigate spying by federal authorities on the Trump campaign. 

Eclipsed and how. But the deep flaws in this honored coverage, instrumental in pushing the collusion narrative, shouldn't be overlooked because it's been overtaken by events, or many journalists would prefer to move on, or because President Trump calls it "fake news." The flaws reveal broader problems in reporting this continuing story and journalism in general.

The prize went jointly to the two publications for 10 articles apiece reporting on Trump-Russia developments throughout most of 2017, the chaotic first year of Donald Trump’s presidency.

Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron: basking in acclaim last year.

AP Photo/Andrew Harnik

Their heavy investment in shaping and advancing the collusion story is telegraphed by some of the headlines alone. Imagine them with exclamation points and they could easily have appeared in the sensational sheets published by Joseph Pulitzer himself:  Sessions Spoke Twice to Russian Envoy! (Washington Post); Emails Disclose Trump Son’s Glee at Russian Offer! (New York Times); Trump Reveals Secret Intelligence to Russians! (Post).

This work is not comparable to earlier Pulitzer scandals that still haunt the Times and Post. But in a way, a lot of it is worse. The Walter Duranty and Janet Cooke embarrassments mainly involved individual fraud or malpractice – outlier transgressions. These articles generally reflect a standard practice that is ripe for abuse but which the profession is unlikely to abandon: anonymous sourcing.

Anonymous sources are a necessary evil. They often allow journalists to report information they could not gather otherwise. But because their identities are shielded from readers who have no independent means of assessing their credibility or motivations, news organizations must vet these sources rigorously, especially to convey that they are not being used by them or even in league with them at the expense of a faithful presentation of facts.

In the case of much of the Pulitzer-winning Trump-Russia work, anonymous sources were used with insufficient skepticism and a lack of caveats in the service of a credulous and disingenuous journalism of innuendo. The journalistic failures these articles reflect would be problematic even if Special Counsel Robert Mueller had made a case for collusion. His findings just make them all the more obvious. 

In the main, the 20 honored, mostly multi-bylined articles are sourced to “current and former officials,” “people with knowledge of ...” or similar formulations. Sometimes a specific number of sources is given, but with few exceptions there is little insight into who these people were beyond the adjectives “senior” or “foreign” to describe officials here and there.

Rereading the stories, I searched mostly in vain for answers to these questions: Which government departments did the sources work for? What were their motivations? Were any of them seeking to deflect attention from their own failure to prevent Russian meddling in the 2016 election? How many were current and how many former (i.e. Obama administration) officials? Were any of them connected to former high-ranking officials who publicly – and profitably -- turned against Trump? (Men such as James Comey of the FBI, John Brennan of the CIA and James Clapper, the former Director of National Intelligence.) For that matter, were those high-profile men also serving as anonymous sources? And – a problem little discussed in journalism – could the same people have been sources for multiple stories, creating a distorted, snowballing impression of major wrongdoing?

Just as important, apart from White House denials of allegations, I usually searched in vain for voices both inside and outside the government who dissented from the dark interpretations that were offered.

Michael Flynn: a treason story? 

AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta

The work’s shortcomings become clear in Pulitzer-winning articles on two members of Team Trump: two published by the Post at the beginning of 2017 on the president’s first national security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn; and one published by the Times at the end of the year on campaign adviser George Papadopoulos.

Both men pleaded guilty, under pressure, to so-called process crimes of lying to investigators – not for conspiring with Russians.

The Posts’ two February 2017 articles on Flynn, totaling more than 3,300 words, read, then as now, as though the paper were drawing a bead on a treason story for the ages. They quote anonymous sources (“current and former U.S. officials,” “some senior U.S. officials”) inviting the worst possible interpretations from Flynn’s contacts with Russians and his misstatements about them.

A central premise of the stories – that acting Attorney General Sally Q. Yates felt the 1799 Logan Act was a good reason to raise alarms about Flynn – should have provided a strong tipoff that the sources might have been politically driven. Democratic Party partisans had long had the knives out for the maverick ex-general, whom President Obama had forced to resign as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. But that context is missing as the Post presents at length, with grave seriousness and little skepticism, deep official suspicion seemingly of Flynn's every recent move. He's flouting the Logan Act! That the Logan Act is a moldering, never-used statute against private diplomacy routinely honored in the breach – and almost certainly not applicable to members of an incoming administration -- is referred to only as a challenge to be overcome in nailing the guy.

A similar lack of skepticism drove much of the Trump-Russia coverage, in which the president’s allies were cast as nefarious operatives and the president’s enemies as high-minded protectors of the nation. This mindset led the Post, Times, and other outlets to push the collusion narrative while ignoring or downplaying unprecedented scandals that led to the removal or demotion of top officials at the Justice Department and FBI who led the Russia investigation.

Emailed with an interview request, Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron sent back a stock defense of the Post's Trump-Russia work through a spokesperson (full text here). "Our reporting never presupposed what the special counsel would conclude with regard to obstruction of justice or an actual conspiracy with the Russians," the statement reads. The Times, where I worked for a long time, did not respond to emailed interview requests.

Doubling Down on Collusion

One might chalk up the failures of the Flynn coverage as a one-off in the fast-moving early days of the Trump administration – before major questions had emerged. But, as doubts grew about the papers' coverage – and what their anonymous sources were telling them - the Post and Times just doubled down on the collusion narrative. This is another peril of using anonymous sources, especially for a major ongoing story: Reporters can come to identify with and feel they are working with those sources. Now, without betraying sources they have promised to protect, unless the sources release them from their pacts of confidentiality, the Times and Post will be hard-pressed to explain how and why they misrepresented a story of historic import.

With such misrepresentation in mind, consider the brand-new origin story for the Trump-Russia probe that the Times broke on Dec. 31, 2017 – coincidentally the publication cutoff date for 2018 Pulitzer consideration.

The timing is key for another, more important reason. Until then, it was widely believed that the main impetus behind the Trump-Russia probe had been the so-called Steele dossier – a series of memos supposedly from a former British intelligence agent, Christopher Steele, that suggested Trump was in cahoots with the Kremlin. The FBI had used it to secure a warrant to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

George Papadopoulos with his wife, Simona Mangiante. He says the FBI set him up.

AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

Revelations in late October that the Clinton campaign had funded the dossier, whose main claims had never been verified, raised new questions about the probe. Cue the new origin story, starring George Papadopoulos. Right at this time of doubt, “four current and former American and foreign officials” were suddenly telling the Times that the collusion probe was sparked not by the dossier, but by the loose lips of the junior Trump campaign foreign affairs adviser, during “a night of heavy drinking” in London with a senior Australian diplomat.

Papadopoulos told the diplomat, Alexander Downer, in May 2016 that Russia, as the Times put it, “had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.” And in the next paragraph the Times article connected that to her missing emails.

But the powers of deduction at the paper went only so far – and in only one direction. The Times reporters' email insight did not prompt them to raise in their story the issue of Hillary Clinton’s illegal use of a private server. If the government believed Russia or other foreign countries had access to Clinton’s unsecured emails while she served as secretary of state, why didn't the Times story address whether the "dirt on Hillary Clinton" compromised national security or opened her up to blackmail? Similarly, the "dirt" revelation did not lead the paper to question FBI’s Director Comey's public exoneration of Clinton in July 2016 over the email affair.

Instead, the Times article left the very strong impression that the man who supposedly tipped off Papadopoulos about the emails, the Maltese academic Joseph Mifsud, was working for the Russians – even though his ties to Western intelligence were well-known. Cryptically, the Times suggested that Downer might have been “fishing” for information from Papadopoulos, without asking why, or for whom. It also did not report that Downer had long ties to the Clinton Foundation.

These details were important then and remain so now, not least because Attorney General Barr is looking into federal authorities' spying on the Trump campaign and because Papadopoulos suggests he was set up by the FBI. Whatever the truth, the point is that the newspaper’s coverage demonstrated little interest in pursuing legitimate avenues of inquiry that conflicted with the collusion narrative.

President Obama scoring points against Mitt Romney in 2012 over the latter's Russia warning. "The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back," Obama said.

AP Photo/David Goldman

Clinton’s insecure email server also does not merit a mention in another honored article: the Post’s 8,000-word ticktock, “Obama’s secret struggle to punish Russia for Putin’s election assault,” a largely sympathetic piece with spy-potboiler overtones sourced to Obama aides on a legacy-cleanup mission. Despite all the space granted to this lengthy takeout with mega-graphics, there was evidently no room for a mention of the possible cues for anti-American mischief that Vladimir Putin might have picked up from Secretary Clinton’s mistranslated “reset” button; Obama's assurance into an open mic to President Dmitri Medvedev of post-reelection "flexibility" on missile defense; Obama's belittling of Mitt Romney's warning of the Russian threat in a presidential debate; or Russia's land grabs on the Obama administration’s watch.

The prize-winning articles appeared at a time when both publications, only recently flirting with extinction in the digital age, were enjoying anti-Trump surges in online clicks, subscriptions, and circulation. In the runup to the 2016 election the Times’s newsroom, not opinion, editors -- that is, people who would oversee Trump-Russia coverage -- had given premier front-page display to its media columnist articulating a rationale for anti-Trump media bias. In this charged atmosphere, and no doubt with an eye to posterity, the Times let cameras follow its journalists into their work spaces and personal lives in real time for a brand-extending documentary series on left-leaning Showtime.

'Deeply Sourced'

In its announcement, the Pulitzer Board praised the papers, probably Washington’s biggest recipients of unauthorized government leaks, for their “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage.” I asked Dana Canedy, the Pulitzer Prize administrator, how the board knew enough about the unnamed sources and the relentlessness of the work to say this, and she said it concluded this from the work itself, and the papers’ prize applications.

But if anything was "deeply" demonstrated, it was the deeply embedded Washington Post and New York Times DNA on last year’s Pulitzer Board, a third of whose 18 members were current or former Times or Post journalists. In addition, two board members, ex-Timesman Stephen Engelberg of ProPublica and Emily Ramshaw of the Texas Tribune, head nonprofit newsrooms that share coverage with the Times and the Post.

Canedy, a Times alumnus, declined to comment on its deliberations for this prize, but she said that as a general rule board members who presently work for an outfit with submissions under prize consideration have to recuse themselves. Presumably, that meant recusals from the National Reporting deliberations by Pulitzer board Chairman Eugene Robinson, an ardent anti-Trump Post columnist, and member Gail Collins, an ardent anti-Trump columnist for the Times. Canedy says she remains a party to final prize decisions as part of her present job.

Still, The Federalist this week noted numerous coincidences of Pulitzers going to news organizations with journalists on the board. Whether the apparent conflicts are benign or problematic, news organizations risk coming off as clubby, back-scratching pots alleging that the kettle has the world’s darkest hue when exposing self-dealing in corporate, government or even industry prize-awarding contexts.

That’s a long way of coming around to what the board ultimately did, after jurors got through with their evaluations of entries: jointly award the National Reporting prize, making not one, but two news powerhouses happy. “The New York Times entry, submitted in this category, was moved into contention by the Board and then jointly awarded the Prize,” it said in its announcement.

And the rest, as they say, was history. Until the special counsel delivered his report.

RealClearInvestigations Editor Tom Kuntz helped edit the New York Times's Pulitzer Prize submissions in several years of his 28-year tenure as an editor at the paper ending in 2016. RealClearInvestigations, which aims to fill gaps in Trump-Russia coverage, also relies on anonymous sources. Examples can be read here, here, here and here

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Groom accused of assaulting wedding waitress to stand trial

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Matthew Aimers, of Willingboro, New Jersey, arrived at court Thursday in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, with his new wife at his side.

The judge upheld all charges, including indecent assault, indecent exposure, imprisonment of a minor and related offenses in the November conflict at the Northampton Valley Country Club in Richboro.

Aimers' attorney, Louis Busico, says his client "denies and rejects" the accusations by the waitress, who is now 18. He says Aimers' wife, Kayla, "150 percent supports him."

An affidavit says the waitress had spurned Aimers' advances during the reception. Police allege he followed her into a bathroom and sexually assaulted her. He was taken from the hall in handcuffs after a drunken brawl.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that the accuser testified Thursday and that spectators were removed from the courtroom.

Source: Fox News National

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Micro-investing startup Stash raises $65 million, launches stock rewards program

Stash_LifestyleImg2
An undated handout image of the Stash micro-investing app. REUTERS/Stash/Handout

March 12, 2019

By Anna Irrera

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Stash, a New York-based startup that allows consumers to save small sums of money and make micro-investments through its mobile app, has raised $65 million in funding, it said on Tuesday.

The funding round was provided by existing investors, including Union Square Ventures and Breyer Capital, and led by a private institutional investor, the company said. It did not disclose the name of the private institutional investor.

Stash, which also offers a debit account service connected to a card, said it had launched a new rewards program through which users can receive fractional shares of stock of companies when they make certain purchases.

Customers using Stash’s debit card to shop on Amazon.com Inc or buy food at Chipotle, for example, will receive a fraction of each company’s publicly traded stock. For purchases at private companies, such as local stores or restaurants, customers will earn “stock-back” in an exchange traded fund.

The share purchases will be funded by Stash, which will make money through debit card interchange fees, Ed Robinson, co-founder and president of Stash, said in an interview. The program had been previously tested with a restricted number of customers.

“During the testing period, we saw an overwhelmingly positive response from users as they pay ordinary bills like Netflix, and in return received Netflix stock as well as access to dividends, educational resources and financial advice,” Robinson said in a statement.

Like Stash, other financial technology companies have been expanding their offering to include banking-like services. Many are seeking to lure customers through rewards or by paying higher interest.

Student lender SocialFinance offers a checking account with a 2.25 percent interest rate, while digital wealth management startup Wealthfront last month launched a cash account with a rate of 2.24 percent.

Stash’s banking services are offered in partnership with Green Dot Corporation and its subsidiary Green Dot Bank, which means the debit accounts are protected by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

(Reporting by Anna Irrera; editing by Diane Craft)

Source: OANN

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Illinois billboard touts ‘safe, legal abortion’ in hit against Missouri pro-life laws

An Illinois abortion clinic is using a billboard to tout the state as an abortion-friendly alternative to others like Missouri, which has stringent laws on abortion.

"Welcome to Illinois, where you can get a safe, legal abortion," the Hope Clinic for Women billboard reads near the Missouri-Illinois border.

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“The goal of this billboard is to remind people coming in from Missouri that they are now in a state that trusts and allows pregnant people to make their own healthcare and family planning decisions,” Erin King, Hope Clinic executive director, said in a statement.

The Granite City, Ill., abortion clinic, located just 10 minutes outside of downtown St. Louis, got the idea from a liberal group that put up a similar billboard in Colorado near the Utah border.

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“It was just a no-brainer for us,” Alison Dreith, a Hope Clinic spokeswoman, told the Riverfront Times. Half of Hope Clinic's patients come from Missouri to get an abortion.

As Missouri state legislators consider the "heartbeat bill," making it illegal to get an abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected, the state only has one abortion clinic and has a 72-hour waiting period to get an abortion. That's in stark contrast to Illinois, which is working to make abortion more and more accessible, including a bill that could repeal parental notification in the case of minors.

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Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, pledged at the beginning of the year to make Illinois “the most progressive state in the nation when it comes to standing up for women’s reproductive rights.”

Source: Fox News National

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Lithuania jails Soviet defense minister for 1991 crackdown

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Albanian police arrest Indian wanted for money laundering

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Source: Fox News World

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Asylum applications in EU fall to pre-crisis levels

FILE PHOTO: Tents where migrants live are seen in the downtown of Nantes
FILE PHOTO: Tents where migrants live are seen in the downtown of Nantes, France, September 17, 2018. REUTERS/Stephane Mahe/File Photo

March 14, 2019

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Applications for political asylum in the European Union dropped last year to levels seen before Europe’s migration crisis in 2015, the EU statistics agency said on Thursday.

The findings confirm a downward trend recorded by EU border and coast guard agency Frontex, which estimated that around 150,000 people entered the EU through irregular crossings last year, the fewest in five years and far below the peak of more than a million recorded in 2015.

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(Reporting by Clare Roth; Editing by Francesco Guarascio and Mark Heinrich)

Source: OANN

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Senior White House adviser Jared Kushner said Tuesday that a detailed plan for a merit-based immigration system will be presented to President Trump, giving priority to skilled immigrants rather than those with family ties to the U.S.

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Kushner announced that the new immigration proposal, which Trump will receive this week or next, will resemble the point-based systems in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and will unify people by ensuring strong wages and secure borders while protecting humanitarian values.

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“And I say that If that if I can get Stephen Miller and Kevin Hassett to agree on an immigration plan, then Middle East peace will be easy by comparison.”

— Jared Kushner

After the plan gets presented to Trump, it will likely undergo some changes and then he will decide when to proceed with it, Kushner said.

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“It’s very, very complicated, but it’s a very interesting issue, and if we can solve it, I do think it’s a critical component for America’s long-term competitive advantage,” he added.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source: Fox News Politics

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Source: Fox News National

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Government dysfunction and an intelligence failure that preceded the Easter Sunday bombings in Sri Lanka are traced to simmering divisions between the president and prime minister after a weekslong political crisis that crippled the country last year.

The government has admitted to a “lapse of intelligence” after officials failed to act upon near-specific information received from foreign agencies. Suicide bombers exploded themselves last Sunday in three churches and three luxury hotels, killing 253 people and wounding 400 more. Authorities said eight Muslim militants blew themselves up at their targets while the wife of one of the attackers blasted herself on being rounded up by police.

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The Cabinet led by Wickremesinghe says neither he nor his ministers were informed of the intelligence received by the defense authorities. Sirisena is the head of state, defense minister, minister in charge of the police and head of the armed forces. He also chairs the National Security Council, which includes the heads of security agencies and departments. Traditionally the prime minister also plays an important role on the council.

According to Health Minister Rajitha Senaratne, Sirisena has not included Wickremesinghe in national security affairs since a dispute between them came into the open in October last year. This is an unusual departure from the protocol, he said.

Senaratne said that Sirisena was overseas when the attacks took place and even after that, the National Security Council refused to meet with Wickremesinghe as he tried to give them instructions.

Sirisena has also said that he was not informed of the intelligence received and vowed to overhaul the leadership of the defense forces.

The top bureaucrat at the Defense Ministry, Hemasiri Fernando, has resigned at Sirisena’s insistence.

“It is a major factor,” said Jehan Perera, the head of local activist group National Peace Council, referring to the alleged lack of coordination between the leaders contributing to the failure to prevent the attacks.

“The primary responsibility has to be taken by the president, he did not give the information and he did not act,” Perera said. “He had the Ministry of Defense, took the police from the prime minister, chaired the National Security Council meetings and did nothing,” Perera said.

Kusal Perera, a journalist and political commentator, says security and intelligence officials should have acted on the information whether or not they received orders from politicians.

“If they (Wickremesinghe and his party) were not invited to the National Security Council, why did not they say in Parliament that they were not responsible for the security of the country any longer,” said Perera, who is not related to Jehan Perera.

“Saying that now is taking political advantage, not taking responsibility,” he said.

Sirisena and Wickremesinghe belong to different political parties but came together for Sirisena’s presidential campaign in 2015. Their relationships broke down and their differences exploded last year when Sirisena suddenly sacked Wickremesinghe as prime minister and appointed in his place former strongman Mahinda Rajapaksa, whom he defeated in the presidential election. The crisis crippled the country for more than seven weeks to the point of not being able to pass this year’s national budget on time.

A court decision compelled Sirisena to reappoint Wickremesinghe, but the two leaders have been rivals within the same government.

Rajapaksa, who is the minority leader in Parliament, blames the government for weakening intelligence and dropping its guard, which he had maintained to defeat the separatist Tamil Tiger rebels 10 years ago to end the 26-year-old civil war. He also criticized the government for the detention of intelligence officers accused of extrajudicial killings and abductions during the closing days of the war, which he said crippled the security apparatus before the bombings. According to conservative U.N estimates, some 100,000 people were killed in Sri Lanka’s conflict.

Sirisena summoned an all-party conference Thursday to which Wickremesinghe was also invited. At the conference, Sirisena stressed “setting aside all the political beliefs and difference (so that) everybody should collectively commit towards building a peaceful environment within the country,” a statement from his office said.

“It is not a secret that the disagreements between me and the government aggravated over the past two years,” Sirisena told the country’s media executives Friday. “One of the reasons for that is weakening of military intelligence and arresting military officials unnecessarily and my speaking up against it within and outside the government.”

Jehan Perera said that the security threat could prove politically advantageous to Rajapaksa and his family, with a presidential election scheduled at the end of this year. Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, a younger brother of Mahinda, was the powerful defense secretary during his brother’s reign and has expressed his interest to join the contest.

“People are saying we want a stronger leader and they are talking about Gotabhaya. It (the blasts) has worked to their benefit,” Perera said.

Source: Fox News World

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Cyprus police are intensifying a search for the remains of more victims at locations where an army officer, who authorities say admitted to killing five women and two girls, allegedly had dumped their bodies.

Police said Friday’s search will concentrate on a military firing range, a reservoir and a man-made lake near an abandoned mine approximately 32 kilometers (20 miles) west of the capital Nicosia.

On Thursday, the 35-year-old suspect told investigators that he had killed four more people than he had previously admitted to. All the suspect’s alleged victims are foreign nationals.

Police have already found the bodies of a 38-year-old Filipino woman and two as yet unidentified women.

Search crews are now looking for the daughter of the 38-year-old, a Romanian mother and daughter and another Filipino woman.

Source: Fox News World

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