The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Are You Listening?

Posted on | December 16, 2018 | Comments Off on Are You Listening?

In case you haven’t been listening to The Other Podcast, you really should. My podcasting partner John Hoge has applied his decades of audio engineering expertise to the program and, when the BlogTalkRadio software doesn’t go glitchy on us (as sometimes happens), it’s a lot of fun.

Saturday night, we had a call-in from a Democrat (!!!) who had found our program randomly, and he wanted to talk about the #NeverTrump phenomenon, as inspired by our bon voyage to The Weekly Standard. In case you don’t know it, John didn’t even vote for Trump, and is therefore sympathetic to such sincere Christian conservatives as David French, whom I also consider a friend (while also considering him sadly misguided). As I indicated (“So Much Ahoy,” Dec. 14), I’m more in agreement with Ace of Spades, a regular conservative who has a profound resentment toward Movement Leaders™ who were de facto pro-Hillary and are now de facto pro-Pelosi. Those of us who do not rank as Movement Leaders™ are compelled to go to war with the army we’ve got and to fight or battles as we find them, rather than wistfully wishing we were in an ideal army fighting the battles of our choice. But I digress . . .

 

Saturday’s podcast was also interesting in that I found myself in mid-show reading a Vox article by Murray Waas in which he talked about Michael Avenatti’s newest client, Alexandra Chalupa, attributing his information to a “source with direct knowledge of the matter.” As an experienced editor, what I noticed about this article was that, while Waas conveys the impression his “source” is someone close to the Mueller investigation, he never specifically characterizes his source(s) this way. If you know how investigative reporting works, you understand that if Waas was getting this from a law enforcement source, he would say so, because that would give the story more credibility. Waas wants his readers to believe he knows for a fact that (a) Paul Manafort advised the White House “to specifically target Alexandra Chalupa, a political strategist and consultant for the DNC, for allegedly working with Ukrainian officials”; (b) it was this advice which Mueller was referencing in saying Manafort “lied about his contacts” with the White House; and (c) we should accept this “exclusive” story as true, based on the authority of Waas’s “source with direct knowledge of the matter.” However . . . 

What if Murray Waas’s source is a clever sociopath?

We know that Alexandra Chalupa was working with Brett Kimberlin, one of the most notorious sociopaths on the planet. Furthermore, Kimberlin is a known associate of Neal Rauhauser, an operative whose skill in misleading journalists is remarkable. So that’s at least two known liars who could be sources for Waas’s “exclusive,” and now that Michael Avenatti’s representing Chalupa, that makes three known liars. Of course, we cannot rule out Chalupa herself as this “source” and, because she is a former DNC operative . . . well, that makes four.

Question: If this Murray Waas “exclusive” were true, wouldn’t other reporters be able to match the story? Because if it is true that Manafort was acting as a White House advisor on this DNC/Ukraine angle, and that this was what Mueller was referencing, that would be newsworthy. Wouldn’t we expect to see this story picked up and expanded by the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN, Associated Press, etc.?

But those dogs are not barking, are they?

There is a distinct aroma of bovine excrement here, you see, and I didn’t notice it until John and I were in the middle of our podcast Saturday night. After we got off the air, I put in a call to Lee Stranahan, who’s one of the few reporters following the Chalupa/Kimberlin story, and his hunch about the story closely matched my own.

See John Hoge’s latest “Team Kimberlin Post of the Day.”

Stay tuned, dear readers . . .



 

Category: Russia, The Kimberlin Files, Ukraine

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