Back in the wilds of long ago – last December – I headlined this over at The American Spectator:
The Vindication of Sean Hannity A relentless pursuit of the truth
In which, among other things, I said this:
“Among the many things the witch hunt to get President Donald Trump has brought to light is the Leftist State Media’s aversion to facts — and to any serious investigative reporting that uncovers those facts.
For month after month after month since the Trump election, Hannity has, with disciplined patience, used both his radio and television shows to provide a forum for the kind of relentlessly detailed investigative reporting for which the Washington Post was once famous when uncovering the Watergate scandal.
The real scandal today in the media — and it is a scandal — is that it was Sean Hannity and Sean Hannity alone who insisted on providing the platform and getting at the truth about what did — and did not — happen in the mad, obsessive drive by Washington elites to bring down a president.”
I bring this up again because of the decision by the Department of Justice to drop the case – make that “case” – against General Michael Flynn.
Take a look over here at NewsBusters. The headline?
CNN, MSNBC Suffer EPIC Meltdowns Over ‘Nuts,’ ‘Terrifying’ Flynn Decision; ‘The Fix Is In!’
The story by Curtis Houck says, in part, this (with bold print in the original.)
“In a Thursday afternoon that felt like a trip back to life before the coronavirus pandemic, CNN and MSNBC were not only apoplectic over the Department of Justice dropping its case against retired General Michael Flynn but despondent over the ‘demoralizing,’ ‘destructive,’ ‘nuts,’ and ‘terrifying’ ‘injustice’ that signaled ‘the collapse of the Justice Department’ and ‘the rule of law.’”
Now.
What does this have to do with that earlier column on Sean Hannity’s “ensemble cast” of reporters and lawyers who were given the platform of his radio and television shows to relentlessly investigate all of this?
Simple. As those comments from CNN and MSNBC and others illustrate vividly, these journalistic outlets were not merely anti-Trump – they were obsessed with not doing their job. When it came to Trump-Russia collusion they had an agenda – and that agenda had nothing – nothing – to do with getting the facts or the truth.
Hannity’s “ensemble cast” on the other hand was interested in nothing but the facts and the truth. Documents – thousands of pages of them – were read. Sources were interviewed. Phone calls made. On and on and on went the digging.
The thing that so astonishes is – this isn’t rocket science. This is what journalism was invented to do – report the facts. Tell the truth. But when it came to the Leftist State Media there was a deliberate, willful unwillingness to do that.
The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial on the Flynn decision by DOJ and said in part this:
“The documents filed on Thursday in federal court vindicate the general’s reversal. Justice said the FBI’s interview of Mr. Flynn was ‘untethered to, and unjustified by, the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Flynn,’ and that the interview was not ‘conducted with a legitimate investigative basis.’
We recommend the filing for readers who think this couldn’t happen in America. The filing recounts how the FBI had concluded in late 2016 that there was no evidence that Mr. Flynn had colluded with Russia. But the FBI kept the investigation open after it received a transcript of Mr. Flynn’s conversation with the Russian ambassador to the U.S.
Mr. Comey and his loyalists then set up Mr. Flynn in an interview despite having no legal basis. The documents show that Mr. Comey told his deputies not to inform the White House general counsel of the visit and not to tell the White House about his conversation with the ambassador. They also show that Mr. Comey worked around senior Justice officials, including Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, who thought the White House should be informed. As he did with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on Hillary Clinton’s emails, Mr. Comey acted as if he was a law unto himself.”
This is a long way of saying that what happened here was a massive, massive abuse of power. An abuse propagated by rogue FBI agents, and the Department of Justice bureaucrats.
And the American media simply closed its eyes – or more accurately said, it closed its mind.
Whatever else comes out of all of this, and there is plenty more to come, if we have learned nothing it is that Hannity and crew were right about the injustice done to General Flynn. They were right about the basics of American journalism. They did their job. More to the point at this moment – they are continuing to do it.
And whatever else we have learned, all of these truth seekers helped immensely in, as The Wall Street Journal so accurately called it, The Vindication of Michael Flynn.
Stay tuned
