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Get Wrecked: Special Counsel's Office Issues Rare Statement Debunking Trump-Russia BuzzFeed Story

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  January 18, 2019 1:50 PM

UPDATE: It’s all trash. Special Counsel’s office issued a rare statement gutting the BuzzFeed story like a fish, saying it was not accurate. BuzzFeed is busted folks. The next question is who is getting the ax over there.

UPDATE II: BuzzFeed stands by its trash reporting. Are they calling the Mueller team liars? 

***Original Post***

Oh, look out! Look out! We have another supposed Russia bombshell…that’s not based on evidence. How many times have we seen this movie before? There’s a story, media pandemonium, and then it all falls apart. It wouldn’t be the first time the liberal media has committed malpractice in this regard. In fact, they’ve been horrific in covering this White House. From screwing up timestamps on emails to being incapable of getting a simple koi fish feeding story right, the liberal media in the Trump era has been more reckless than ever before. The Russia investigation stories are especially egregious. Nothingburger is the word that could be best to describe all of it. Cortney nabbed the latest so-called bombshell that dropped last night: President Trump reportedly instructed his ex-personal lawyer Michael Cohen, who was recently sentenced to jail, to lie to Congress about a real estate deal in Russia. And that the special counsel's office supposedly had the evidence.

BuzzFeed’s Anthony Cormier and Jason Leopold wrote the story. They supposedly have solid sourcing, but no one has seen the evidence. Over at RedState, Joe Cunningham rehashed Jason Leopold’s sordid history with the truth. He dredged up an analysis by Columbia Journalism Review about his 2006 story that Karl Rove, former Deputy White House Chief under Bush, was going to be indicted. Even Salon had to remind its readers of his shoddy stories.

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From CJR in 2006:

We wonder if the folks over at Truthout.org are rethinking their affiliation with reporter and serial fabulist Jason Leopold. Leopold, you may recall, is the freelance reporter who was caught making stuff up in a 2002 Salon.com article, self-admittedly “getting it completely wrong” in pieces for Dow Jones, and had his own memoir cancelled because of concerns over the accuracy of quotations.

Leopold’s latest addition to his application for membership in the Stephen Glass school of journalism came on May 12 of this year, when he got what appeared to be the scoop of a lifetime. Now writing for Truthout.org, Leopold reported that Karl Rove “told President Bush and Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten, as well as a few other high level administration officials,” that he was about to be indicted in the Valerie Plame CIA leak case, “according to people knowledgeable about these discussions.”

Leopold claimed that multiple sources “confirmed Rove’s indictment is imminent. These individuals requested anonymity saying they were not authorized to speak publicly about Rove’s situation.”

[…]

When Leopold’s story was first called into question a few weeks ago, Salon’s Tim Grieve reminded readers of Leopold’s checkered history with the publication. Salon removed Leopold’s August 29, 2002 story about Enron from its site after it was discovered that he plagiarized parts from the Financial Times and was unable to provide a copy of an email that was critical to the piece. Leopold’s response? A hysterical rant

[…]

Fast forward to March 2005, when Leopold’s memoir, Off the Record, was set to be released. In the book, according to Howard Kurtz, Leopold says that he details his own “lying, cheating and backstabbing,” and comes clean about how he got fired from the Los Angeles Times and quit Dow Jones just before they fired him because, as he said, it “Seems I got all of the facts wrong” on a story about Enron.

But the book was not to be. Rowman & Littlefield, the book’s publisher, cancelled production just before it went to press after one of the book’s sources threatened to sue. That source, Steven Maviglio, who was a spokesman for California Governor Gray Davis, said that Leopold “just got it completely wrong” when recounting how he allegedly told Leopold that he “might have broken the law by investing in energy companies using inside information.”

True to form, Leopold blamed his publisher for the controversy…

Cunningham ended by noting that both authors appear to not be on the same pages regarding their evidence. Cormier saying they haven’t seen the evidence, Leopold saying, “We’ve seen the documents.” 

On Twitter, Cunningham detailed in a lengthy thread how he spoke to an executive producer at ABC who said no other outlet has been able to verify this story with their sources, and they’ve never even heard about this development. And how the anonymous sources and the fabulist history of Leopold represent some of the major red flags with this story. It’s quite possible we have another Trump-Russia story that totally blows up. At the same time, he says that the allegation, which again could be total trash, is too big to ignore, and you bet that Democrats are going to investigate this. They already have said that. It provides another lengthy breathe of oxygen to this story that has gone nowhere. Given the liberal media’s history of failure with the Russian collusion beat, take this with a grain of salt.