The most recent erroneous report comes from the Washington Post — which is getting to be a regular trafficker in fake news — claiming that the Trump administration was all in with the Justice Department’s ongoing stonewalling of key congressional investigations.
The Post noted:
Last Wednesday, senior FBI and national intelligence officials relayed an urgent message to the White House: Information being sought by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes could endanger a top-secret intelligence source.
Top White House officials, with the assent of President Trump, agreed to back the decision to withhold the information. They were persuaded that turning over Justice Department documents could risk lives by potentially exposing the source, a U.S. citizen who has provided intelligence to the CIA and FBI, according to multiple people familiar with the discussion and the person’s role.
The showdown marked a rare moment of alignment between the Justice Department and Trump…
As Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist notes, that’s about as untrue as it gets. (Related: Another day, another mainstream media fake news report: NBC, ABC, forced to walk back report over Cohen ‘phone tap’.)
In reality, the Trump White house “does not support ongoing Department of Justice (DOJ) efforts to obstruct a congressional inquiry into the agency’s activities before and after the 2016 election” she wrote, based on interviews with “multiple White House and congressional officials.”
The Post story came on the heels of the issuance of a subpoena by the House Intelligence Committee to the Justice Department for information related to someone the FBI and/or DoJ was using as a source of information within Trump’s 2016 campaign.
A spy, in other words.
The Post and the rest of the Pravda media were attempting to portray Nunes the same way they always attempt to portray him — bumbling, partisan, and a risk to national security, when he is none of the above.
Nunes and other members of Congress have been wrestling with the FBI and Justice Department for months in their attempts to get to the bottom of a series of scandals involving Obama-era corruption and nearly all of it relating to improper actions taken by both agencies against Team Trump.
Back in the day when Congress sought answers from various federal bureaucracies to its questions, it was called “oversight” — a constitutional function of the Legislative Branch. But in the age of Obama, it became “interference” and was increasingly met with resistance rather than cooperation.
That attitude has carried over into the Trump administration, along with no small number of Obama holdovers. And frankly, lawmakers like Nunes are sick and tired of the stonewalling.
As is Trump — which is what made the Post story just plain dumb from the outset.
In response to Nunes’ subpoena, the Justice Department ramped up its public relations division; Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein even went so far as to call Nunes’ effort to get answers “extortion” (that alone should have gotten Rosenstein fired).
The Post picked up the mantle and ran with it, claiming — as noted above — that yeah, Trump was with his DoJ on this one and had been convinced to push back against those evil Republican lawmakers.
But it wasn’t true. Hemingway noted that “multiple” White House and congressional officials categorically denied that the administration was backing the DoJ’s stonewalling.
“No one at the White House has told the Department of Justice or any other agency to refuse to comply with a Congressional subpoena,” a senior White House official told The Federalist.
In fact, the source noted further, the White House expects that all the parties concerned will find a way to comply with the subpoena. Added a senior Republican source: “The White House has consistently told congressional leaders that it expects agencies to comply with Congressional oversight requests.”
That makes perfect sense, given that Nunes and other GOP committee chairmen are trying to get to the bottom of a massive scandal that was aimed at the president.
WaPo should issue a massive correction — but of course, it won’t.
Read more about the Post’s bizarre reporting at WaPo.news.
J.D. Heyes is a senior writer for NaturalNews.com and NewsTarget.com, as well as editor of The National Sentinel.
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