By Brian Cates
They’ve been out to destroy Representative Devin Nunes [R-CA] for going on three years now. Ever since he called a press conference where he revealed the electronic communications of the Trump transition team members discussing domestic policy had been intercepted, unmasked, transcribed and then circulated among the highest levels of the outgoing Obama administration. Now it looks like Nunes has decided the time has come to start fighting back.
Nunes has been the point man in the United States Congress for the exposure of the real reason for the RussiaGate Hoax: that the spying being done on the Trump campaign during the 2016 election and afterward was politically motivated. The Russian collusion hoax was created to hide the fact this federal spying was being done for political purposes.
For this reason, the attacks on Nunes have been not only relentless but increasingly vicious as he helped bring more and more evidence to light about how and why SpyGate happened. [For a great summary of Nunes’ role in uncovering SpyGate, I highly recommend investigative journalist Lee Smith’s new book, “The Plot Against The President”]
The deepest, darkest fear of the Democrats & their DNC Media Complex allies is that this guy they've mocked and attacked for more than three years over calling out their RussiaGate hoax is about to be completely vindicated.
The latest and most absurd of the media's attacks on Nunes occurred on November 23rd when both CNN and The Daily Beast published stories claiming Nunes secretly met in Vienna, Austria in December of last year with the former top Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who had been fired from that job due to pressure applied by former Vice President Joe Biden. At the time of his firing, Shokin just happened to be investigating corruption inside an energy company named Burisma, where Biden's son Hunter sat on the executive board.
In a video that recently went viral, Biden is seen proudly bragging about how he forced Shokin's firing by threatening to withhold a billion dollars in US foreign aid.
CNN reporter Vicky Ward's story alleged that Nunes was part of some clandestine conspiracy to meet with Shokin in Vienna as part of a secret White House/GOP investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden's activities in Ukraine.
Although Hunter Biden's strange position on the executive board of Burisma was not a secret before the video of Biden bragging about Shokin's firing went viral, as it's troublesome implications were reported on in the media back in 2014, now that his father Joe Biden was the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, it is a subject that is getting renewed scrutiny.
Nunes immediately said this story was completely false, he and Shokin had never met and he insisted that CNN and the Daily Beast retract their reports or he would sue them. Instead of retracting, the two DNC Media outlets doubled down on the story.
True to his word, on December 3rd, Nunes filed a defamation lawsuit against CNN seeking $435,000,000 in damages. [Whether he will file another lawsuit against The Daily Beast remains to be seen]
Nunes had given CNN plenty of time to retract this blatantly false story before he filed this lawsuit. And now they’re going to pay, because Nunes can conclusively prove he was never in Vienna Austria at any time in 2018 and certainly not between November 30th and December 3rd, 2018, as CNN's story alleges.
The single source CNN cites for this “Nunes-Met-Shokin-In-Vienna” narrative is Lev Parnas, a former associate of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani who was recently indicted as a participant in a campaign finance fraud scheme.
Parnas & his lawyer, Joseph Bondy, are presently trying to get him an immunity deal by offering to tell Adam Schiff & his committee all about their supposed dealings with Nunes as part of a GOP scheme to convince the Ukrainian government to investigate Joe & Hunter Biden, beginning late last year in December.
The fact Parnas is trying to get himself a deal should lead to any claims he makes to be subjected solid sourcing before publishing them. Yet besides Parnas, there is no sources at all for the stories that CNN & The Daily Beast ran with.
The Problems with The Nunes-Met-Shokin-In-Vienna Story
Both men involved at the center of the story, Nunes and Shokin, have denied ever having met, in Vienna or anywhere else.
The Washington Post apparently has spoken to a source that confirmed that Shokin claims to have never met Nunes, but refused to elaborate on that in its reporting. In a report that Nunes himself cites in his lawsuit against CNN, the Washington Post included this single, brief line:
“Shokin denied that he met with Nunes.”
No context is given for this denial by Shokin; who he made this denial to and when. It's just thrown into the middle of the Post's article by the author Amber Phillips, who quickly moves on, after making the bare assertion.
Nunes was not alone on this trip; he was part of a large delegation.
Nunes was in both Libya and Malta on a trip that spanned November 31st to December 3rd of 2018 as part of a Congressional delegation. He was not by himself, he was traveling with a rather sizable group of people, which included other members of Congress and their staff.
The idea that he somehow surreptitiously sneaked away from the larger group, hopped on a plane and flew all the way to Vienna and then back again before anybody noticed his absence is beyond absurd.
And yet this is what Parnas is claiming, and it is what CNN and The Daily Beast published.
Ten minutes of fact-checking would've demonstrated how preposterous Parnas' claims are, yet neither media outlet seems to have spent any time trying to poke holes in his account. Instead, because it confirmed their biases and attacked a person these media people want to destroy, they grabbed it with both hands and ran with it.
The Fake News Media Has Lost Its Mojo
The Mainstream Media literally cannot survive in its present form. Many of these media outlets that engage in the behavior that CNN does are going to be sued out of existence, very likely by the time Donald Trump leaves office five years from now in January 2025.
These massive corporate media outlets with vast resources like CNN aren’t even doing basic fact-checking any longer before running Fake News like this Parnas fiction.
This is not a resource problem. These outlets could exhaustively fact check these stories before running them. This is an ideological problem. The ideology of the staff running these outlets is actually preventing them from fact-checking their own stories.
And this is why they are doomed.
My take is Nunes is going to be able to prove that the CNN editors that allowed this Parnas story to run knew it was false and defamatory and decided to run it anyway because they wanted to harm Nunes’ reputation.
The people now running some of these huge corporate media outlets have descended into such political partisanship they will run bogus stories they know aren’t true as long as it will damage political figures they don't like.
Media reporters have made an ingrained habit of grabbing and running with the most absurd stories about the Trump White House, just so long as the stories confirmed their biases.
Remember how early in the Trump presidency we got the lurid tales from supposedly serious media outlets of a sad and depressed Trump sitting in his bathrobe all day chugging Diet Coke and watching The Gorilla Channel? Many reporters were already so lost in their Trump bias at that point they couldn't see they were being played. They ended up taking every leak, no matter how absurd, and rushing it into print or onto the air, and then having it blow up on them.
Editors used to have the job of preventing this kind of thing from happening. There are supposed to be adults in these newsrooms. Where are they? Can they not see what’s happening? Are they completely unaware of how this will end?
There Will Be No Recovery from This
Many of the political activists disguised as reporters and editors at these media outlets have passed the point of no return; they couldn’t even stop themselves from engaging in this destructive behavior even if they wanted to.
Their hatred for Trump & this frustration at the implosion of their precious Trump/Russia Collusion Hoax has pulled them into a downward spiral where they are descending faster and faster into irrelevance.
This was demonstrated by a recent Washington Post column in which the author lamented that more than a month of strident press coverage had not moved the needle at all when it came to public support for impeaching this President.
These Fake News media people are not victims. Nothing is happening to them that should not be happening to them. They keep lighting their own credibility on fire and then whining how unfair it is they can’t seem to influence the public like they used to.
They keep claiming Trump is the one that is doing this to them, with his constant “Fake News” attacks. The truth is, this rot had set-in long before Trump ever ran for President.
He is not the cause of their downfall; he is only hurrying them down a path they had already chosen for themselves.
Brian Cates entered the political arena in March 2012, following the death of Andrew Breitbart. He is currently a political columnist for The Epoch Times and UncoverDC. Brian is based in South Texas and is the author of: “Nobody Asked For My Opinion … But Here It Is Anyway!”
Twitter: @drawandstrike
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