Three hours.
At 5:30 PM CDT on Monday, Slate.com posted a long and intriguing piece called Was A Trump Server Communicating With Russia, written by Franklin Foer. The piece, as most of us know by now, chronicled an months long, intense look at the deepest, darkest nether-regions of the IT world, a twisted and complicated web of metadata and IP addresses, anonymous hackers and secret workshops of internet gurus who help flesh out nefarious actions that could bring harm to individuals, companies, economies...and nations. It was a fascinating, and potentially incriminating read — but what made it so eye-opening and potentially explosive was the vivid detail and extensive cross-checking of facts, documents, reports and interviews with key industry experts that provided its readers with a fairly solid base of evidence to draw conclusions — or at least harbor sincere doubts about Russia’s role in the US elections and specifically in communicating directly with one of the two campaigns for the Office of the President.
Around a half hour later, more information hit the wires, this time courtesy of David Corn at Mother Jones, who posted an exclusive story A Veteran Spy Has Given The FBI Information Alleging a Russian Operation to Cultivate Donald Trump. In some contrast to the story at Slate, the Mother Jones article focused less on the findings of IT specialists, but instead painted in graphic detail the information, presented to the FBI over the summer, from a “former Western veteran spy” who had allegedly been tipped off to a years’ long effort by Russian banking interests and intelligence personnel, most likely under the direct command of Vladimir Putin. According to Corn, the information shared by the Western intelligence asset was shared directly to the FBI via conversation with an FBI contact and through a series of memos that defined the ramifications of his/her information as “something of huge significance, way above party politics”. Like the Slate article, Corn confirms in the Mother Jones piece that:
“Mother Jones has reviewed that report and other memos this former spy wrote”, adding, “...a senior US government official not involved in this case but familiar with the former spy (in question) tells Mother Jones that he has been a credible source with a proven record of providing reliable, sensitive, and important information to the US government.”
So, in two separate pieces, written by two separate organizations, a case was laid bare to, at a minimum, cast a shadow of extreme doubt over the veracity of ongoing Trump Campaign claims, led by the candidate himself, that “...the closest I came to Russia, I bought a house a number of years ago in Palm Beach, Florida… for $40 million and I sold it to a Russian for $100 million including brokerage commissions.” That quote, of course, came from another detailed report in June from Time Magazine that also laid out a detailed and complicated trail of sources and documents, along with financial filings and reports, that now appear to have landed eerily close to the mark laid out by the former intelligence operative in the Mother Jones piece.
By late evening, the world was introduced to an extensive, detailed, sourced and documented trail of suspicions, doubts and remarkable discoveries and findings regarding the ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, all of which were, at a minimum, strikingly consistent with the already public findings issued by numerous U.S. Intelligence Agencies that Russia was directly responsible for hacking into DNC and other Democratic campaign servers and e-mails, and was likely deliberately attempting to influence a U.S. election. Ironically, even FBI sources as recently as today confirmed that besieged FBI Director James Comey confirmed that Russian interests were likely behind the election hacking, but declined to make that information public when confirmed due to concerns about the timing of such a release so close to a U.S. election.
It should be clear to anyone of any political stripe what the potential impact and threat to national security such a connection and imposition by an adversary such as Russia could have on the stability of the United States government. Taken to its extreme, an assumption that a previously reliable, well connected Western intelligence asset with ties to the Kremlin had presented accurate and correct evidence of a Russian scheme to exploit vulnerable political figures like Julian Assange (under indictment for rape and under asylum in a foreign embassy) and Donald Trump, whose continuing business failures and narrowing lines of credit risked leaving him penniless and potentially under legal scrutiny, would represent — unquestionably — one of the most dangerous and sinister threats to American interests in our time.
Yet, by 8:30 PM CDT, the New York Times, in an article authored by Eric Lichtblau and Steven Myers (who themselves had at one time been pursuing a number of angles spelled out in the Slate.com article), had apparently gathered enough information to conclude that in its ongoing investigations of Donald Trump, the FBI had concluded that there was no clear link to Russia to be found. The article, in one broad brush, attempts to disarm the notion that Russian servers were communicating with the Trump Organization, for example, by citing “Intelligence officials” that state “...the F.B.I. ultimately concluded that there could be an innocuous explanation, like a marketing email or spam, for the computer contacts.” (emphasis mine) Yet, according to the article, no specific inquiries were answered by the F.B.I. regarding that assertion or any of the facts presented by the Times. In one brief, seemingly innocuous sentence directly preceding the anonymous quotes attributed only to “intelligence officials” that form the entire basis of the article is the sum total of what the NY Times writers were really able to confirm and verify/refute from either the Slate or Mother Jones articles:
“F.B.I. officials declined to comment on Monday.”
So, in three hours, from the time the Slate.com article was posted for public consumption, and then — a half hour later — the Mother Jones article by David Corn was published, the NY Times was able to digest the information presented in both articles, review and compare documents and memos utilized by those sources to the information previously made available to Mr. Lichtblau and Mr. Myers, reach out for comment from FBI officials, track down “intelligence officials” for comment, reach out to Congressional leaders on the record (such as Harry Reid) for comment on the briefings and timelines presented in the piece, reach out to the Trump campaign for comment, write the article, confirm the sourcing and freshness of the information presented, draw conclusions against the actions taken by FBI Chief Comey and other players in the Clinton disclosures last Friday, run the article past editors and department heads for review and approval, post to IT for electronic copy conversion and “break the news”.
That’s one HECK of a three hours work by Mr. Lichtblau and Mr. Myers.
What’s clear on the surface is that even if the vast majority of the quotes, sources, information, conclusions and interviews with “intelligence officials” had already been conducted, baked into some semblance of “reporting” on the matter, and prepped for ultimate release sometime in the near future, today’s report about the FBI opening an inquiry into the foreign bank dealings of Paul Manafort, former Trump campaign manager, casts an entirely new context on the previously reported findings by the unnamed intelligence officials that the FBI had no evidence [that] has emerged that would link [Trump] or anyone else in his business or political circle directly to Russia’s election operations...” Given the easy connection that could be built between the information detailed by Slate and the prior conclusion that “it could’ve been SPAM”, the NY Times would be obligated to dig into whether the FBI’s internal findings had changed or its perspective on the Trump connection through Manafort had been caused to shift based on some new information in the case that led to the inquiry. However, no such questions appear to have been asked, and the case is just briefly mentioned in the Times article only in the context of a seemingly inconsequential connection between Manafort and Ukraine in some distant past, with a conclusion that “the focus in that case was on Mr. Manafort’s ties with a kleptocratic government in Ukraine — and whether he had declared the income in the United States — and not necessarily on any Russian influence over Mr. Trump’s campaign”. Really? Can this “official’s” statements be verified by the FBI? Senator Reid? Anyone who might rise above the level of a (potentially) atagonistic or biased source reporting just one version of a confluence of events behind the private doors of the FBI that are likely complex, politically charged, and highly classified?
At this hour, there is a slowly growing sense that, at least in part, this NY Times story — composed and published in what would appear to be either less than three hours time or the greatest single coincidence in modern history — serves to mitigate the reporting done by Mr. Foer and Mr. Corn. At a minimum, it creates room for another false equivalency and potential counterbalance to the call from the Clinton Campaign for a real response to the stories from the FBI, or at least inside players that rise beyond the level of unnamed “intelligence sources” that cannot, by definition, be FBI officials (“the FBI would not comment on Monday”) Yet, in its haste to inject itself into the teeth of a rapidly emerging story, the Times could not have:
- interviewed David Corn and compared notes on the information Corn was privy to versus any such documents provided to the Times reporters by the intelligence sources;
- refreshed any legitimate internal FBI connections to link in the events that led to the Bureau opening an inquiry into Paul Manafort Monday (especially with respect to whether that call for inquiry was based, in part, on a potential association with financial interests outside of the Ukraine or on behalf of the Trump campaign);
- addressed the apparent conflict between the information from their intelligence source(s) stating that the FBI had concluded in July that “there could be an innocuous explanation, like a marketing email or spam, for the computer contacts”, and the specific and well sourced information in the Slate article that would serve to refute that conclusion, or at least cast significant new doubt over whether the FBI was right in concluding it (or hadn’t);
- compared its reporting with the Office of Senator Harry Reid, and attempted to reconcile its sources’ assertions about seemingly innocuous and dead-ended findings with the FBI to Reid’s statement (which would seem to indicate a knowledge of the situation much more in line with Corn and Foer’s);
- spoken directly to more than a couple of sources from the Slate article to explore the feasibility of the conclusions drawn by the intelligence community on the potential for the Trump to Alfa Bank server interactions to be harmless, especially in light of the server name change which is rumored to have happened shortly after the FBI was briefed on the matter;
and, at its most basic —developed this story from the ground up...tonight.
We live in a productive world. Newsrooms don’t produce stories on typewriters, and newspapers are running well behind a flash story on the internet or social media. We all know the value of time. And we all know what three hours of time can realistically produce, or what requires advance notice and a heads’ up from the outside to produce in what looks like three hours..
In three hours, a story like the one published in the NY Times by Mr. Lichtblau and Mr. Myers doesn’t just get compiled from scratch. One evening of “reporting” and summarization of prior discussions, limited sources and months-old briefings does not hold up to a litany of facts, data, sources, experts and detailed reporting on specific conversations that serve to produce some enormously consequential questions. At a minimum, the Times piece cannot stand alone as any sort of end story on a deeply complex and highly sensitive matter that one Senator, with direct knowledge and briefings on the subject, described as “explosive information”. The media, this community, and all voters deserve to know — as the Clinton Campaign has demanded and Mr. Corn has posited in his piece — “what did the FBI know and what did they conclude about the memos and reports presented by a once reliable Western intelligence official?” We deserve to know why such inquiries were not reported to the public out of respect for an election, but e-mails not yet seen by the FBI were serious enough to be reported under 15 days before the election. We deserve to know more about the FBI’s level of confidence that a candidate for the President of the United States is not involved — to any degree — with an ongoing operation to influence an election and exert influence over that candidate.
And we deserve to know, Mr. Lichtblau and Mr. Myers, why three hours of work on your part should suffice to speak for the FBI, diffuse the assertions and questions raised by two news organizations that spent hundreds of hours cultivating their sources, interviewing experts with direct knowledge of the subject matter and possessing source documents provided to intelligence officials that lay bare the reasonable questions we might have about whether the issues at hand were as inconsequential as your anonymous “intelligence officals” report them to be. At a minimum, we deserve to know something about these sources, and how your reporting confirmed their information to be accurate and unbiased.
In three hours.
And we deserve to know, as we might reasonably conclude, if someone(s) tipped you to these upcoming stories. Someone(s) who might not like what they said. Someone(s) who might want to assure you that these assertions are non-stories within agencies they purport to have inside access to, even though those agencies will not confirm or deny any such thing to you.
In three hours, you were up with your story. Some will choose to point to it and it alone as sufficient to cast doubt on the conclusions drawn by Mr. Foer and Mr. Corn. I will point to those three short hours as nothing more than evidence that your paper is in no way qualified with this story to serve as anything more than another viewpoint based on sources of a largely unknown reliability, and will hope that other reporters do a lot more homework and digging to bridge the gaps in your reporting.
While I would like to hear what they have to say now, I also know enough to understand that if I want real answers, real reporting and reliable insight into this all-too-important potential story…
...I’ve got to wait more than three hours.