Michael Cohen. Boston Globe/AP.
Robert Mueller's special counsel has released a statement condemning a BuzzFeed report that President Trump had ordered his lawyer, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress. AP. BuzzFeed released a story, citing two unknown FBI officials, that said Cohen had been instructed to lie about a potential deal between President Trump and Russia over a hotel to be built in Russia. They claimed that Mueller had evidence from witnesses, text messages, e-mails and other documents.
Muller's office released a rare public statement saying ‘‘BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the special counsel’s office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony are not accurate.’’ However, the story was in the news for many hours before the statement and caused a firestorm of controversy and calls for impeachment.
My Comment:
When I first saw this story early this morning I, after rolling my eyes, thought to myself that it would be debunked before the end of the day. I was correct. It's very clear that this story was completely false if even the Special Counsel has said it was fake news.
There was obvious reason to be skeptical. Obviously, BuzzFeed is not a reputable news organization. Even by the standards of today, they do not follow journalistic standards and do not report information accurately and without bias. They are more of a gossip blog and clickbait farm than an actual news organization.
But even if the outlet was a more reliable one, it was clear that the story had a very good chance of being fake news. Why? Because they relied on unnamed sources and provided no documents or proof of the claim being made. So many stories that have turned out to be false have been based on anonymous sources. If someone isn't willing to go on the record with a story there is a very good chance that it isn't accurate.
There are a couple of things that could have happened here. The first is that BuzzFeed is just incompetent. They may indeed have sources in the FBI but they didn't do the research to follow up on their claims. They could have asked the office of the Special Counsel or the Trump administration if the story was accurate but it seems they didn't even do that.
It's possible that BuzzFeed's sources were mistaken. Many times low ranking people hear gossip and it gets distorted from what the truth is. It's also possible that the sources were out and out lying, which is known to happen. Finally, it is possible that false information was leaked in order to suss out leakers. Had BuzzFeed done even the least bit of fact checking, they could have avoided this. BuzzFeed knows that there is a market for bad news about Trump and wanted to get it out as soon as possible for the ad revenue that would be generated.
The other possibility is that BuzzFeed is just making things up. One of the authors of the report, Jason Leopold, has a long history of plagiarism and false reporting. He has had other reports pulled for lies and some of his stories were totally false. I would not be surprised if he made up this story out of whole cloth.
The problem is that much of the damage has already been done. For the entire day people were calling for Trump's impeachment and becoming even more unhinged than usual. There was, of course, little reaction from those of us on the right, as we have done this dance before, but for the left this was a major overreaction to a false story.
Of course the fact that so many people saw the original story and all the blue checkmarks on Twitter spreading the fake news, means that the story spread far and wide. I doubt that Muller's office statement on the story being fake news will spread as far and as wide. People want it to be true and others don't want to admit they were wrong.
This exact same thing happens to President Trump almost monthly now. Just a little while ago it was the fake news story in the New York Times that said that Paul Manafort colluded with Russia. The New York Times issued a retraction but the damage was done. And then there was the Jim Webb as Secretary of Defense story that even burned right wing outlets like Breitbart. Indeed, though I rightly issued skepticism about the Webb report, I wanted it to be true, so I wrote a post up about it when I probably should have ignored it. The entire news media is like this now.
At this point you should treat every story about President Trump that doesn't come directly from the man himself with some amount of skepticism. Some good advice would be to treat any story about Trump as potentially false. Wait a few days and if the story doesn't fall apart by then, there is a chance that the story is true...
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