Buzzfeed's Report on Trump And Russia Has NO EVIDENCE
Buzzfeed dropped a "bombshell" report claiming that Donald Trump ordered Michael Cohen to lie to congress about a Russian Trump tower meeting. However this isn't the first bombshell report we have seen or heard about and the others were mostly retracted and found to be false.One of the reporters from Buzzfeed actually said on CNN they have NOT seen any evidence but trust their sources. How many times do we have to hear this without any evidence to back it up?
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Last night, BuzzFeed News dropped a bombshell report claiming that Donald Trump instructed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about the Trump Tower Moscow project.
They claim that two official sources who are involved in the matter have stated this is true.
However, on CNN, one of the reporters claimed they haven't actually seen any evidence.
And forgive me, I'm going to be a bit skeptical because we keep hearing about these massive bombshell reports claiming Trump has direct ties to collusion with Russia, and then they retract, people get fired, there's apologies, and it happens time and time again.
In fact, I've got six examples for today where this has happened.
So today, let's take a look at exactly what they're claiming in this story, and then take a look at some of the scrutiny people have brought up as to why they think this may actually not be true.
But before we get started, please head over to TimCast.com forward slash donate if you'd like to support my work.
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From BuzzFeed News, President Trump directed his attorney, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress about the Moscow Tower project.
Trump received 10 personal updates from Michael Cohen and encouraged a planned meeting with Vladimir Putin.
President Donald Trump directed his longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, according to two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the matter.
Trump also supported a plan set up by Cohen to visit Russia during the presidential campaign in order to personally meet President Vladimir Putin and jumpstart the tower negotiations.
And even as Trump told the public he had no business deals with Russia, the sources said Trump and his children Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr.
received regular, detailed updates about the real estate development from Cohen, whom they put in charge of the project.
The first and most important bit of criticism I have is that the BuzzFeed News headline is a statement of fact.
Trump did this.
It's definitive.
However, in the story, they then open it by saying, according to federal law enforcement sources.
I'm not saying the story's wrong, but it would be particularly important if, in the headline, they said, sources allege.
Many critics of the story said Michael Cohen can't be trusted.
And in fact, the story does make mention that Michael Cohen has testified to the special counsel.
However, the reporters at BuzzFeed said their sources are not Michael Cohen, but law enforcement officials.
But forgive me, they are still citing Michael Cohen down the line, so it actually makes things a bit harder to believe.
There have been so many stories over the past year that made these claims, and unfortunately, they keep getting retracted.
More importantly, however, this morning on CNN, one of the reporters told Alison Camerota they haven't actually seen any evidence from Mediaite.
BuzzFeed News bombshell reporter, no, we have not seen the evidence supporting our report.
Host Allison Camerota opened the interview by asking Cormier if he had seen the evidence to which Cormier replied, not personally.
He then clarified, the folks we have talked to, two officials we have spoken to, are fully, 100% read into that aspect of the special counsel's investigation.
Upon hearing that one of the reporters hadn't actually seen evidence, I became much more skeptical.
As I mentioned, how many stories do we have to have where they claim Trump was connected to Russia or something happened?
I try not to be false.
And now, what BuzzFeed is asking us to do is to trust them as they trust two sources who then trust their witnesses.
It is such an absurdly long line without evidence.
I'm sorry.
I'm going to be very skeptical of this.
I would like to see you publish some actual documents.
Even if BuzzFeed had documents from the law enforcement agents they published, it would still be the agents interviewing witnesses and not hard proof.
And this is why it's so damn hard to prove any of these things, because what evidence could they really have?
I mean, if Trump sent an email or a text message, sure, that would be proof.
But if it was an in-person conversation, it's going to be very, very difficult to prove.
And I have to wonder why, then, this becomes such a big bombshell.
But then we have another bit of contradicting information.
Because now the other reporter on the story, Jason Leopold, is claiming they have seen documents, which makes me wonder why they don't have their stories straight.
Did they see evidence or not?
MSNBC tweeted, We have seen documents.
We have been briefed on documents.
We are very confident in our reporting.
BuzzFeed News reporter Jason Leopold, who co-wrote Bombshell New Report, says, Now, he said we saw documents.
He didn't say we saw proof.
He didn't say what we saw proves anything.
He didn't say we saw the documents.
So, once again, I'm left skeptical.
Is he trying to say he did see evidence, or is he just saying that they looked over things that make them believe they're sources?
Once again, they haven't provided us with evidence.
Now look, I actually like BuzzFeed News.
I do.
BuzzFeed News is very different from BuzzFeed.
They will get some scrutiny because they are still somewhat part of the same organization, though I do believe they're different companies.
But BuzzFeed News has been the most responsive when it comes to news, and I've seen them do a relatively decent job on covering very contentious political issues.
However, at this point, The New York Times doesn't get my trust, because they've had to correct stories.
Many other outlets like ABC News have had to correct their stories.
BuzzFeed is not going to be above established mainstream press when it comes to these issues.
Without hard evidence, I'm sorry, I'm just not going to believe this.
First, we can go back one week to this New York Times story.
FBI opened inquiry into whether Trump was secretly working on behalf of Russia.
Halfway down the story, it says, no evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly in contact with or took direction from Russian government officials, and FBI spokesman and spokesman for the special counsel's office both declined to comment.
We then have this story, just about a week ago as well.
Manafort accused of sharing Trump polling data with Russian associate.
This was another bombshell report, unfortunately for the New York Times.
They issued a correction a day later.
A previous version of this article misidentified the people to whom Paul Manafort wanted a Russian associate to send polling data.
Mr. Manafort wanted the data sent to two Ukrainian oligarchs, not Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian oligarch close to the Kremlin.
We can go back to last July.
ABC parts ways with investigative reporter Brian Ross.
Brian Ross, the chief investigative correspondent for ABC News, is leaving the network seven months after he botched a report involving President Trump and the Russia investigation, a mistake that led to rebuke from the White House and concern about self-inflicted damage by news organizations already facing scrutiny.
He came under fire in December after ABC News retracted and apologized for his errant report that Michael Flynn, the former National Security Advisor, had been directed by Donald J. Trump to make contact with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign.
ABC News suspended Mr. Ross for four weeks without pay.
When he returned, the network barred him from covering the President and the Russia investigation, assigning him instead to longer-term projects that he worked on from an office several blocks away from the news division's headquarters.
He was also kept from appearing on live broadcasts.
We can go back to 2017, this story from Politico.
Three CNN staffers resign over retracted Scaramucci Russia story.
Three CNN staffers have resigned following the publication and subsequent retraction of a story linking a Trump transition team member to the Russia-related investigations.
We can go back to August from The Intercept.
CNN, credibly accused of lying to its audience, CNN's blockbuster July 26 story that Michael Cohen intended to tell special counsel Robert Mueller that he was present when Donald Trump was told in advance about his son's Trump Tower meeting with various Russians includes a key statement about its sourcing that credible reporting now suggests was designed to have misled its audience.
Yet CNN simply refuses to address the serious ethical and journalistic questions raised about its conduct.
The substance of the CNN story itself regarding Cohen, which made headline news all over the world, and which CNN hyped as a bombshell, has now been retracted by other news outlets that originally purported to confirm CNN's story.
That's because the anonymous source for this confirmation, Cohen lawyer Lanny Davis, now admits that, in essence, his confirmation was false.
As a result, both the Washington Post and the New York Post outed Davis as their anonymous source and then effectively retracted their stories, confirming parts of CNN's report.
CNN, however, has retracted nothing.
All inquiries to the network are directed to a corporate spokesperson who simply says, we stand by our story and are confident in our reporting of it.
A newsletter sent Sunday night from CNN's two media reporters, Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy, contained the same corporate language, but addressed none of the questions raised about CNN's report.
And once again, in the past couple weeks, five weeks after The Guardian's viral blockbuster Assange-Manafort scoop, no evidence has emerged, just stonewalling.
Five weeks ago, The Guardian published one of the most extraordinary and significant bombshells in the now two-plus-year-old Trump-Russia saga.
Donald Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort held secret talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and visited around the same time he joined Trump's campaign, claimed reporter and best-selling collusion author Luke Harding, Dan Collins, and a very sketchy third person whose name was bizarrely scrubbed from The Guardian's byline for its online version but appeared in the print version.
Those were just the stories I pulled off off the top of my head.
There are probably others, and they probably go back several years.
It is hard for me to believe any of this is true at this point, because the media has cried wolf so many times, at some point you have to say, listen, unless you have hard evidence, I'm not going to listen to this anymore.
And typically, I don't like to do things like this, but it still needs to be brought up.
Columbia Journalism Review has questioned Jason Leopold in the past.
Now again, Leopold is one of the authors of this story.
This is from 2006.
Jason Leopold caught sourceless again.
We wonder if the folks over at Truthout.org are rethinking their affiliation with reporter and serial fabulist Jason Leopold.
Leopold, you may recall, is the freelance reporter who was caught making stuff up in a 2002 Salon article, self-admittedly getting it completely wrong in pieces for Dow Jones, and had his own memoir cancelled because of concerns over the accuracy of his reporting.
I believe I briefly worked with Jason Leopold at Vice News, though I don't think we ever actually worked on anything together, more just in passing, and my understanding is that over the past several years he's produced some pretty respectable reporting, sending out Freedom of Information requests, so I'm not one to go back 13 years and try and impugn the honesty or integrity of a reporter, but I've got to say, if I can read through all of these stories that presented no evidence, were either retracted, people were fired, now we're hearing from one of the reporters they haven't seen any evidence, the other reporter is claiming they have seen documents, I'm just gonna have to say, you know what, of course this story is gonna go viral, of course it's gonna trend, it always does.
How many times does this need to happen?
It's like people in the media know it's probably not true, or there's no real evidence to back this up, but they want it to be true because of the Trump bump.
That's when they get ratings, they get clicks, they get views, because of the salacious, sensational nature of the content they publish.
Everybody wants to speculate.
Yet here I am, trying to figure out what is true and what isn't, and I can't.
Because BuzzFeed presented no evidence.
They're simply saying, trust us, As we trust these guys who trust their witnesses.
That's a game of telephone as far as I'm concerned.
Now don't get me wrong.
I'm not saying the story is false.
I just don't know.
It may as well be false as far as I'm concerned because it's interesting to hear.
Yes, we've heard over the past several years Trump has been involved in this, but no one has presented any evidence like the New York Times just said a few days ago.
There has been no evidence.
Showing Trump is working for or with the Russians.
And even now, what they're claiming about Trump Tower isn't even a direct tie to Russian collusion.
They're simply stating that Trump may have lied.
I gotta say, I find this whole thing kind of weird for another reason.
Michael Cohen is Trump's lawyer.
Why would Trump be advising Cohen on what to do?
You hire a lawyer to advise you on what to do.
Now I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just saying the whole thing sounds very weird that Trump would tell his lawyer what to be lying about.
You hire a lawyer to tell you what is or isn't legal or illegal and to act on your behalf in certain regards.
So Cohen should already know what he should or shouldn't be saying.
Why would Trump need to tell his lawyer what to do?
That's a pretty bad lawyer.
Now, a lot of people are going to point out Cohen is a pretty bad lawyer, but that's another issue.
This whole thing just sounds absolutely ridiculous.
Once again, here we are, talking about Trump and Russia, and no evidence has been presented.
Just another he said, she said, trust us as we trust them.
And you know what?
I'm sorry.
I'm not gonna do it.
I'm gonna sit back and wait for you to publish documents.
I'm gonna wait for something hard and definitive so I can see that this actually happened.
But for the time being, you've never presented that.
No one has.
So let me know what you think in the comments below and we'll keep the conversation going.
Do you think this is another ridiculous nonsense story?
I know a lot of people who are on YouTube aren't gonna trust BuzzFeed.
I actually think BuzzFeed's okay for the most part.
I'm sure BuzzFeed believes this story is true.
I'm sure they actually trust their sources.
But how am I supposed to know your sources are telling the truth?
I don't know who they are!
Look, I get it.
Anonymous sources can be very important.
But without evidence from your sources, this story should never have been published.
So anyway, comment below.
We'll keep the conversation going.
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