[August]

We'll see who wins this dog fight.

https://spectator.org/the-media-give...-to-obamagate/

It is slowly dawning on some in the media, including David Ignatius, the Washington Post reporter who served as a stenographer for leaking Obama embeds, that this story is moving in Trump’s direction. Ignatius had to make this point gingerly, lest he incur the wrath of his liberal confreres, but he made it nonetheless on Face the Nation:

So under existing surveillance orders, the United States is listening to all kinds of diplomats, intelligence officials around the world under various authorities. And when that collection picks up incidentally the names of Americans, Joe Russia happens to be calling Joe America, Joe America’s name is typically minimized. It’s — it’s masked so that that person’s privacy is — is protected. In — in certain circumstances when it’s necessary to understand who the conversation is — was between, the name is unmasked and then if — if there’s a — a legal investigation beyond that, there — there — there are even more reasons.
What’s happened this month is that what initially seemed a preposterous argument by Donald Trump, that he had been wiretapped by President Obama illegally, has morphed into an argument about privacy, about proper masking techniques, a very technical, legal issue, and is now accepted, I think, as part of the mainstream set of issues that are going to be debated by the two intelligence committees. And from — from Trump’s standpoint, that’s, I think you’d have to say, that’s a success. It may be a pyrrhic victory for Nunes, whose — whose credibility, the ability to lead the committee, is radically compromised, but that’s now in the center stage.

Eli Lake, the columnist for Bloomberg who reported on the Rice revelation (Cernovich says that Bloomberg also sat on the story until he broke it), said to the displeasure of the comically biased Katy Tur, “This is troubling what happened here.” That is not what Tur wanted to hear. She quickly tried to change the subject and later made the preposterous argument that the focus on Susan Rice helps Russia.
In other words, no one is supposed to notice that one government did interfere in the U.S. election — ours. For months and months, the Obama administration was spying on Trump and leaking hints of its investigation to the press in the hopes of helping Hillary, who, by the way, colluded in the effort. Yet even the ruthless partisan Adam Schiff can’t “definitively” cite a single proof of collusion on Trump’s part, as he reluctantly acknowledged on Sunday. Given all the spying and leaking on Trump, wouldn’t we know by now if they had any evidence of collusion?
To say that Trump in this matter is more sinned against than sinning is an understatement. He was the blatant victim of political espionage and criminal leaking by the Obama administration, then when he complained about it, he was smeared anew. Two questions have swirled around this story: Did the Obama administration spy on Trump? Did Trump collude with the Russians? The answers are yes and no. The media wanted the answers to be no and yes. So now their game is to pretend like they didn’t ask the questions or that the “real story” is Trump’s imprecise tweeting. Notice that almost every story on the Rice revelation begins with throat-clearing about how it doesn’t “vindicate Trump’s tweet,” as if grading him on a tweet, in which he was clearly using wire-tapping as a synonym for spying and investigating, is the most pressing concern here.