21st CENTURY TINY MUMMIES: The French Dispatch and the New Yorker’s Collapse into Resistance Journalism.
Just as with the Michael Cohen story, Michael Avenatti seemed to be pulling levers behind the scenes. In May of 2018 [Ronan] Farrow had dined with Michael Avenatti. A week after the Blasey Ford accusation in September, Avenatti would accuse me and Brett of being present at 10n high school parties where girls were gang raped. Just before the accusation broke, I got a phone message from Jane Mayer, who along with Farrow is a Marquee New Yorker writer. Mayer breathlessly revealed that there were “shocking and horrible” allegations about me and Brett that were about to surface. She didn’t specify, and when I called her back three times, Mayer never picked up the phone.
A few months earlier, in the March 12, 2018 New Yorker, Mayer had published an exclusive piece: “Christopher Steele, the Man Behind The Trump Dossier” It was a profile of Christopher Steele, a former British spy who had produced a dossier claiming that Trump had been involved in scandalous behavior with Russian prostitutes and that the Kremlin was using the information to blackmail the president. In the years since, the dossier story has collapsed, with major media outlets like the Washington Post retracting large chunks of their coverage and adding editor’s notes to many stories.
Special prosecutor John Durham had revealed that the entire thing was produced and promoted by the Hillary Clinton campaign. In her New Yorker piece Mayer also reported that Robert Hannigan, head of GCHQ, a British intelligence agency, intercepted a “stream of illicit communications” between “Trump’s team and Moscow” at some point prior to August 2016. Hannigan then briefed CIA director John Brennan about these communications. Brennan later testified this inspired the original FBI investigation.
Journalist and Russiagate debunker Matt Taibbi raised a question that William Shawn or any other solid old-school editor would have asked: what did “illicit” mean? Taibbi explains: “If something “illicit” had been captured by GCHQ, and this led to the FBI investigation (one of several conflicting public explanations for the start of the FBI probe, incidentally), this would go a long way toward clearing up the nature of the collusion charge. If they had something, why couldn’t they tell us what it was? Why didn’t we deserve to know?”
Read the whole thing.
(Classical reference in headline.)