[Federalist] doubling down on fake news

Next time you want to consider the federalist as an alt or god help you primary opinion, think twice about treating your mind to such garbage.


https://www.mediaite.com/online/the...-thoroughly-debunked-whistleblower-bombshell/

It’s bad enough when a news outlet makes a mistake in reporting something groundbreaking and is forced to correct. It’s another realm entirely for a news outlet to report something wrong – and refuse to correct or even acknowledge their error.

Call it a fake news story fit for the Trump
Sean Davis, an editor at conservative website The Federalist, published a storyon Friday claiming that before the whistleblower complaint against Trump was made, “the intelligence community secretly eliminated a requirement that whistleblowers provide direct, first-hand knowledge of alleged wrongdoings.”

The Federalist story was quickly debunked. In fact, it had been debunked even before it was published. Cato Institute senior fellow Julian Sanchez explained to Federalist editors Davis and Mollie Hemingway that their theories about the process – which they had been expressing on Twitter – were based on a profound misunderstanding of the law.

The Federalist published the story anyway, and it was picked up as evidence of an anti-Trump conspiracy by Fox News, Republican lawmakers, and eventually the president himself. Trump linked to Davis’s story on Twitter and was still pushing the theory as of Monday;

While the theory and Trump’s absurd caricature of it earned hourly coverage on Fox News, other outlets including CNNand the Daily Beast published thorough explanations of why it was complete nonsense, and based on a misreading of a disclosure form.

Finally, on Monday night the intelligence community inspector general (ICIG) released a statement confirming what fact checks of the Federalist theory said all along: no requirement for a whistleblower to provide first-hand knowledge was eliminated, because such a requirement never existed.

There was a change in the forms because, according to the ICIG, “certain language in those forms and, more specifically, the informational materials accompanying the forms, could be read – incorrectly – as suggesting that whistleblowers must possess first-hand information in order to file an urgent concern complaint with the congressional intelligence committees.”

As Republican Senator Chuck Grassley has made clear and the Daily Beast explained: “There’s a reason the form has allowed secondhand reports all along. The requirement for firsthand whistleblowing only is completely made up.”

This evidence has been presented to the editors of the Federalist. A traditional news outlet would likely be humbled and issue a correction in response. The Federalist is not a traditional news outlet.

Sean Davis and Mollie Hemingway have doubled down on the air at Fox News and online on Twitter and the website, insisting that the ICIG statement — which was issued to clean up the mess created by their botched report, which it clearly undermines — actually vindicates their
Regardless of what the editors of the Federalist flood their Twitter feeds with, it should be obvious (to anyone not under the employ of Domenech and his mysterious financial backers) that Davis botched his original report thanks to a fundamental misunderstanding of how the whistleblower process works.

His original story claimed — in the lede! — that the ICIG “secretly eliminated a requirement that whistleblowers provide direct, first-hand knowledge of alleged wrongdoings.”

The ICIG statement made clear that this was never a requirement. It was never eliminated because it never existed.

Moreover, the whistleblower did claim first-hand knowledge on some of the aspects detailed — so not only is the Federalist story wrong, but its “explosive” allegations are completely irrelevant to the broader Ukraine story it sought, and they continue to seek, to undermine.

 

And some fun history... many in the GOP party went through a similar transformation.