During the election season, the establishment media were working overtime to dig up stories that would hurt former President Donald Trump’s chances at re-election. Now one of those major stories is increasingly coming into doubt.
A June 26 report from The New York Times claimed that Russia had offered secret bounties to militants in Afghanistan to encourage them to kill American troops.
This story caused major outrage and led Democrats to levy accusations of treason against Trump. Leftists said at the time that the president’s relationship with Russia’s Vladimir Putin had put American troops in danger.
At the time, Trump called the report “fake news,” saying on Twitter, “Intel just reported to me that they did not find this info credible, and therefore did not report it to me or @VP. Possibly another fabricated Russia Hoax, maybe by the Fake News @nytimesbooks, wanting to make Republicans look bad!!!”
On Thursday, he seemed to be proven right.
A senior intelligence official told reporters that the U.S. had “low to moderate confidence” in the bounty allegations, The Wall Street Journal and many other outlets reported.
“Translated from the jargon of spyworld, that means the intelligence agencies have found the story is, at best, unproven — and possibly untrue,” The Daily Beast said.
It said information regarding the alleged bounties came from “detainee reporting,” which suggests that someone who was being held in a cage may have fabricated the story in order to be set free.
Once again, the establishment media is only willing to report the truth after the election has ended and their candidate of choice has taken office. We have seen this countless times, ranging from stories about Hunter Biden to Andrew Cuomo.
In July, The Daily Beast published an article titled, “Russian Bounties for Killing Americans Go Back Five Years, Ex-Taliban Claims.”
It conceded that Mullah Manan Niazi, the ex-Taliban member who was quoted in the story, could have his own reasons for making claims about bounties. However, The Daily Beast said other individuals confirmed an increased risk for U.S. troops, implying that the allegations had merit.
“Two individuals who spoke to The Daily Beast … said it is clear from the report that there’s an increased risk for U.S. troops in Afghanistan because of Russia’s behavior,” it reported.
Nine months later, however, with Democrat Joe Biden installed in the White House, the left-wing outlet has changed its tune.
“There were reasons to doubt the story from the start,” The Daily Beast said in Thursday’s article. “Not only did the initial stories emphasize its basis on detainee reporting, but the bounties represented a qualitative shift in recent Russian engagements with Afghan insurgents.”
“Russian operatives have long been suspected of moving money to various Afghan militants: an out-of-favor former Taliban official told The Daily Beast on the record that Russia gave them cash for years. But the Russians had not been suspected of sponsoring attacks on U.S. forces outright — an escalation that risked confrontation with the U.S., and occurring long after it could have made a difference in the war.”
This sentence quite literally contradicts its previous reporting. In the July article about the aforementioned former Taliban official, The Daily Beast quoted him saying, “The Taliban have been paid by Russian intelligence for attacks on U.S. forces — and on ISIS forces — in Afghanistan from 2014 up to the present.”
Now it is arguing that while Russia most likely gave some sort of money to Afghan militants, we never should have believed that it paid them for direct attacks on Americans.
The Daily Beast gave merit to this idea by quoting an ex-Taliban official and writing an entire article about it, and yet it has now completely shifted the goalposts. If the outlet thought the story was so doubtful, why would it publish an entire article lending credence to it?
The answer, of course, is that the establishment media had no problem running unverified and unchecked stories around election time as long as they hurt Trump. Now that the election is over, they have decided it may be safe to report the truth for a change.
Yet even in their current reporting, they are not willing to admit fault for running bogus stories.
Americans are supposed to believe these false reports were just honest mistakes, not a coordinated effort by the establishment media to push a partisan agenda. Don’t buy it.
The establishment media are nothing more than another arm of the Democratic Party. They are dangerous, they are dishonest and they deserve to be held accountable.
