#JOURNALISM: Docs: Prominent Journo Showed Draft of Narrative-Driving Russiagate Story to Oppo Firm.
In the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, the high-profile Washington reporter Franklin Foer, according to recently-published documents, did something that would, in all likelihood, get an intern run out of town: He showed a full draft of an unpublished story to one of the co-founders of Fusion GPS, the Democratic-allied research firm notorious for producing a dubious dossier containing the claim that Donald Trump was being blackmailed by the owners of a “pee tape.” More troublingly still, this isn’t the only time Foer has contravened a fundamental journalistic norm—or the only time his editors have apparently let it slide.
Foer is a fancy, connected, and well-known journalist, formerly the editor of The New Republic and currently a staff writer at The Atlantic, who is working on what will presumably be an insidery and well-sourced book about the first 100 days of the Biden administration. The brother of famed novelist Jonathan Safran Foer and author of ponderous, well-reviewed books like How Soccer Explains the World, he’s the sort of journalist whose dispatches set the tone not just for what will be covered by, but how it will be covered in, the elite centrist press. Throughout the summer and fall of 2016 he was far ahead of most of the mainstream press in forwarding the theory that Trump was in essence a Russian agent, publishing conspiratorial articles with headlines like “Putin’s Puppet” and “Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia?”
Last fall, Foer was at the center of a mini-scandal in the Fox News cinematic universe. Court documents filed in relation to the indictment of Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussman on charges of lying to the FBI appeared to show that Foer had sent the first 2,500 words of a draft of that second, highly influential article to Fusion GPS—the opposition-research firm behind the infamous “Steele dossier”—ahead of the article’s publication on Slate on October 31, 2016. The firm, the court filings revealed, had told him it was “time to hurry,” at least suggesting that it wanted the unconvincing conspiracy theory to be published ahead of the November 8 general election, in time to influence the results, and that Foer was serving as its catspaw. . . .
That brings us to this week, when the blog The Reactionary published documents appearing to show in black and white that in June 2016, Foer in fact ran the entire draft of a story by one of the co-founders of Fusion GPS before publishing it at Slate. One email shows a file called “Manchuriancanidate.foer” attached; given the timing, it seems highly likely that this is a version of the story that eventually ran under the headline “Putin’s Puppet” on July 4, 2016.
Related: The ‘cabal’ that bragged of foisting Joe Biden on us must answer for his failed presidency.
Also: Biden acts much more like Putin’s puppet than Trump ever did.