NP - Russiagate Is Ending Like Any White-Collar Crime

[David Morris]

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/04/russiagate-glenn-greenwald-matt-taibbi-denial/


Greenwald saw this coming years ago. “Vesting the powerful with license to
break the law guarantees high-level lawbreaking; indeed, it encourages such
behavior,” he writes in his 2011 book.


In the wake of Barr’s summary of Mueller’s conclusions, a clutch of noisy
Russiagate skeptics in the media, having argued for the past few years that
the whole thing was a neo-McCarthyite hoax, now claim vindication on the
say-so of the attorney general—a curious bit of deference to the nation’s
top law enforcement official, doubly curious coming from the very
journalists who’ve done so much to expose the perversions of our justice
system. “The biggest thing this affair has uncovered so far is Donald Trump
paying off a porn star,” writes
<https://taibbi.substack.com/p/russiagate-is-wmd-times-a-million> Matt
Taibbi, dismissing the entire scandal as hype. And Glenn Greenwald himself has
described <https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1109922052671238144> the
media’s Russiagate coverage as “unhinged conspiratorial trash, distracting
from real issues,” as if creeping international kleptocracy, elite
self-dealing, and two-tiered justice weren’t real issues.

Back in 2011, Greenwald well understood the incentives within the media
industry to protect the powerful instead of challenge them. In his book, he
writes disgustedly about Iran-Contra conspirator Oliver North, who, rather
than being professionally shunned, “was rewarded with a Fox News contract.”
Pretty embarrassing for everyone involved
<https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Afoxnews.com+%22glenn+greenwald%22&oq=site%3Afoxnews.com&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i57j69i58.3760j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8>
.