Media collusion with the Russian effort to disrupt the US

Lee Smith:

Does U.S. Media Help Russia Destabilize The United States?

These documents suggest Russia’s attempt to ‘hack’ the 2016 election was hardly just about the election, and that a main target and beneficiary of that effort is the American press.
Last week leaders of the Senate intelligence committee, senators Richard Burr and Mark Warner, gave a press conference in which they announced they are eager to speak with Christopher Steele, the former British MI6 officer believed to have compiled the controversial dossier of allegations about President Trump’s connections to Russia. Steele reportedly spoke with special counselor Robert Mueller about the dossier, but the committee has yet to hear from the man who laid the foundations for the theory that Trump or his campaign team colluded with Russian officials to fix the 2016 presidential election for him.

One reporter, however, claims that the Senate intelligence committee has verified “some of the Steele dossier.” Ken Dilanian of NBC News told MSNBC Thursday morning that “Burr said they had been able to corroborate some aspects of it.”

But in the 40-minute-long press conference, neither Burr nor Warner suggested anything of the sort. Rather, Burr said “the committee cannot really decide the credibility of the dossier without understanding things like who paid for it, who are your sources and subsources?” Dilanian explained that “two sources told NBC News the committee has corroborated parts of the dossier.”

Dilanian did not explain to viewers what Burr was clearly hinting at—namely, that the Steele dossier is the paid product of a private information company called Fusion GPS, which has become notorious for inventing sleazy and often fact-free attacks on democratic whistleblowers and political figures and feeding them to journalists. Dilanian himself is no stranger to Fusion GPS.
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There is much more.

I suspect that stories like these are part of the reason President Trump is so unhappy with NBC.

This story is an expose of how the media colludes with Fusion GPS which sometimes works with the Russians on spreading their stories in the US.  It is a long piece, but it is chock full of evidence to support Smith's theory.

BTW, in an unrelated story, Fusion GPS has denied giving Buzzfeed the dirty dossier that it published based on the work Fusion did with a former British spy.  If they didn't, who did? was it someone in the intelligence community or the FBI, or possibly John McCain?