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Today in Dean Baquet

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Both Sides Do It being a demanding mistress, the Times has in its trademark way published a story, immediately seized on by the Trumpoverse, strongly implying that the Ukraine whisteblower and Adam Schiff engaged in conduct that was inappropriate:

President Trump and Republicans are excitedly drawing attention to a breaking story in the New York Times that reports that the whistleblower gave advance notice to Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) about the subject of his complaint, before filing it to the intelligence community’s inspector general.

In a way, you can’t blame them for getting all stirred up, because the Times piece claims its new reporting will “thrust” Schiff “forcefully” into more “controversy,” without saying whether that outcome would be legitimate or valid, based on the known facts.

The problem is that the framing of the piece is complete bullshit:

And it won’t be legitimate or valid based on the known facts, no matter how hard Trump and his allies spin to make it so.

[…]

Trump wasted no time in lying about this new report. He claimed it shows Schiff collaborated with the whistleblower on the complaint, calling it a “scam.” The story says no such thing, and there is nothing in it to undercut the substantive complaint itself.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) also claimed Schiff and the whistleblower got caught “orchestrating” the complaint, and that Democrats “rigged” this process.

But there’s nothing in the story that says anything about Schiff having any substantive input into the whistleblower’s complaint. It says Schiff’s aide reported to him some of what the whistleblower said, and that the aide told the whistleblower to get a lawyer and go to the inspector general.

In so doing, the aide advised the whistleblower on how to follow the law. That’s not “rigging” the process. It’s the opposite.

Indeed, the Times piece itself describes the significance of this news by claiming it shows “how determined” the whistleblower was to make his discovery known. This, by itself, does not raise doubts about his motives or truthfulness, or about the complaint itself, in any way. All it does is underscore how serious the whistleblower thought his discovery was, and how urgent he thought it was to get it to Congress.

That outcome is precisely what Trump’s top officials did work so hard to block, so the whistleblower was right to be worried that it might not get to Congress.

But, of course, once the “it’s out there” frame has been established the truth can never get its pants on again.

And beyond this, even if the Republican spin the story encourages were true it would still be completely irrelevant to whether Trump committed misconduct:

Trump did it, he released a transcript confirming that he did it, everything else is an attempt to throw up a big LOL Nothing Matters fog. Good journalists and editors will resist it.

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