On Thursday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Rachel Maddow Show,” host Rachel Maddow told her audience that someone sent her a forged document that was presented as an NSA document that directly implicated a member of the Trump campaign in working with Russia to attack the US election and that while they don’t know who sent them the document, the shopping of this forged document is a “defense” against the Trump-Russia story.
After laying out the reasons why the document couldn’t be authentic, Maddow stated that the fake document “is news, because, why is someone shopping a forged document of this kind to news organizations covering the Trump-Russia affair?”
Maddow then referenced three CNN journalists resigning after the network retracted a story about Trump and Russia and VICE retracting stories about the Trump administration and the fact that both organizations cited problems with the sourcing of the retracted stories.
She then discussed Dan Rather’s firing from CBS over inauthentic documents about George W. Bush. Maddow argued that the Rather scandal was “spike through the heart of the story of George W. Bush’s National Guard service keeping him out of Vietnam, which was a true and interesting story, and which really might have been a serious, ongoing political liability for candidate George W. Bush. But nobody was ever willing to touch it again during that campaign because of the way those documents purporting to prove out the worst aspects of that story blew up like a pipe bomb at CBS News.”
Maddow then said, “Somebody, for some reason, appears to be shopping a fairly convincing fake NSA document that purports to directly implicate somebody from the Trump campaign in working with the Russians on their attack on the election. It is a forgery. Let me caveat that, it is either a forgery, or every single national security official we consulted about this story is wrong about it. I don’t if the Trump campaign worked with Russia or not. If they did knowingly work with a foreign government, a foreign military intelligence service to attack our election to help Trump to the presidency, that is clearly the biggest political scandal in modern American history, by a mile. … We don’t know yet whether it happened or not. Not yet.”
After noting that the media is investigating the Trump-Russia story, Maddow said, “Whether or not the Trump campaign did it, one way to stab in the heart aggressive American reporting on that subject is to lay traps for American journalists who are reporting on it, trick new organizations into reporting what appears to be evidence of what happened, and then after the fact, blow that reporting up. You then hurt the credibility of that news organization. You also cast a shadow over any similar reporting in the future, whether or not it’s true, right? Even if it’s true, you plant a permanent question, a permanent asterisk, a permanent who knows as to whether that too might be false like that other story, whether that too might be based on fake evidence. So head’s up, everybody, part of the defense against this Trump-Russia story, now, we can report, includes somebody apparently forging at least one classified NSA report and shopping it to news organizations as if it’s real. We don’t know who’s doing it, but we’re working on it.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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