We are all in a very unique position of watching the MSM report a story, with others creating misleading headlines about what is actually included in the story, pump those misleading headlines in order to create a completely fake news story, in order to distract from another issue the MSM has been intentionally ignoring.
When a fake news story goes mega-viral, within 24 hours it is usually nearly impossible to track it back to its originating source and within days, the false narrative becomes the one that everyone is talking about with little regard to the initial information, but this morning we have been witnessing the very beginning of how the MSM deliberately and maliciously creates their fake news.
SETH RICH INVESTIGATOR SUING FOX NEWS & TRUMP SUPPORTER
The bullet point above is the story in and of itself, but it doesn't have the anti-Trump flavor the MSM requires, so of course, it needs some tweaking by misrepresentation.
The original story comes from NPR, so we are going to start there with the actual words, along with some misleading assertions, contained within the article, using direct quotes to avoid any "spin."
The Fox News Channel and a wealthy supporter of President Trump worked in concert under the watchful eye of the White House to concoct a story about the death of a young Democratic National Committee aide, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday.
The explosive claim is part of the lawsuit filed against Fox News by Rod Wheeler, a longtime paid commentator for the news network. The suit was obtained exclusively by NPR.
Wheeler alleges Fox News and the Trump supporter intended to deflect public attention from growing concern about the administration's ties to the Russian government. His suit charges that a Fox News reporter created quotations out of thin air and attributed them to him to propel her story.
The emphasized portion of the quote above is carefully crafted, claiming the initial story on the death of the DNC aide, which is Seth Rich, who was murdered in July 2016, right before the Wikileaks email dumps on the DNC and Podesta emails were published, where Rod Wheeler claimed Rich had emails on his laptop showing communication with Wikileaks, was "concocted" under the watchful eye of the White House, the NPR claims at the very beginning, yet further down in the article, it states that the Trump supporter requested a meeting with Sean Spicer and during that meeting they told Spicer about a Fox News report that would be published soon.
On April 20, a month before the story ran, Butowsky and Wheeler — the investor and the investigator — met at the White House with then-press secretary Sean Spicer to brief him on what they were uncovering.
The first page of the lawsuit quotes a voicemail and text from Butowsky boasting that President Trump himself had reviewed drafts of the Fox News story just before it went to air and was published.
Spicer now tells NPR that he took the meeting as a favor to Butowsky, a reliable Republican voice. Spicer says he was unaware of any contact involving the president. Butowsky now tells NPR that he was kidding about Trump's involvement.
So, the article which has already set off a firestorm already on social media and generated a number of headlines already (which we will get to in a moment) admits that the only meeting was between Wheeler, Sean Spicer and the Trump supporter, Butkowsky, and the lawsuit claims, Butkowsky told Wheeler "Trump himself had reviewed the drafts." I seriously doubt Butkowsky was "kidding" when he was pushing the story, he most likely simply lied, but that is neither here nor there, and nowhere in the original NPR article do they show any contact whatsoever between Trump and Wheeler, nor Trump and Fox News, or even Trump and Butkowsky.
In fact everything that supposedly came from Trump, actually came from Butkowsky, claims like "We have the full, uh, attention of the White House on this. And tomorrow, let's close this deal, whatever we've got to do," and "Not to add any more pressure but the president just read the article. He wants the article out immediately. It's now all up to you."
All of it came from Butkowsy, every single quote referencing President Trump in the article is attributed to Butkowsky.
We see this admitted and buried within the very lengthy NPR article, where it states "In the suit, Wheeler alleges that Butowsky was using the White House references to pressure him."
Note- One last point of note about the NPR story before we see exactly the type of evolution in the headlines which somehow all claim that "Trump" pushed the Seth Rich story. NPR claims the initial Fox News story where Wheeler said their was a connection between Seth Rich and Wikileaks, was "retracted."
It wasn't. What did happen, as folks can see for themselves, is an editors note was added claiming that Wheeler had "backtracked" on one specific portion, yet the original story is being reported because the rest of the information provided to Fox News about the Seth Rich murder investigation is still being claimed by Wheeler, and in fact, he did explain the miscommunication in a follow up interview with Sean Hannity.
MSM CREATES A FAKE NEWS STORY RIGHT BEFORE OUR VERY EYES
So, after reading the entire NPR article, what we have is that Rod Wheeler is suing Fox News, one of their reporters and a wealthy Trump supporter, yet a look at the headlines of some of our favorite "fake news" sources, like New York Times, shows the following headline "Lawsuit Asserts White House Role in Fox News Article on Seth Rich." Note the headlines do not articulate that the claim of a "White House Role" contained within the lawsuit comes entirely from a meeting with Spicer, and assertions made to Wheeler by Butkowsky and that nothing in complaint itself shows any collusion by the Trump administration.
The headline should read, Lawsuit Asserts Wealthy Supporter Claimed, Now Denies, White House Press Secretary Saw Notes of Seth Rich Story A Month Before It Ran." There, fixed up their misleading headline for them. You're welcome NYT!
CNN's headline is even better, they can always be counted on to mislead their readers, as they state "Lawsuit: Fox News concocted Seth Rich story with oversight from White House."
Washington Post headline "A timeline of the explosive lawsuit alleging a White House link in the Seth Rich conspiracy."
MediaIte headlines with "BOMBSHELL: Lawsuit Alleges WH and Fox News Coordinated on Seth Rich Conspiracy."
Daily Mail's headline is even more outrageous, headlining with "President Trump pressured Fox News to release fake story about death of DNC staffer Seth Rich and Wikileaks to divert attention from Russia, claims explosive lawsuit."
Wow, that isn't even close to what the lawsuit is claiming. It claims that a Trump supporter was trying to get a Seth Rich story out and that Fox News attributed two quotes to Wheeler that he denies saying. Nowhere in the complaint do they provide any evidence that President Trump "pressured" Fox News.
Two quotes contained within a larger story about a murder that is still unsolved, of a DNC staffer who had access to the information revealed by Wikileaks just days after his death, and to which Wikileaks offered a 20K reward for information leading to the arrest of the murderer, and its founder has implied was the source behind the leaks in a highly publicized interview.
Nothing about those other facts are "fake."
As I have been writing this, the headlines have even devolved more away from the actual story, with liberal websites now claiming "Trump Tries To Escape Russia Scandal Justice By Personally Supervising Fake News Operation."
Another headline blares "Lawsuit Alleges Trump Pushed Fox News to Publish Debunked Seth Rich Story."
Raw Story headlines "Trump reportedly rushed fake Fox News report as he entered the most brutal week of his presidency.
This is just day one, no doubt the headlines will continue to devolve even more into Fake News headlines that do not even resemble what the initial lawsuit is about. Because I am not linking to these fake news headlines, let me prove my assertion that they exist and continue to devolve with a screen shot:
The lawsuit itself claims the White House conspired with Fox News to insert two quotes attributed to Wheeler that he claims he never said, yet everything in the complaint points to the only source of that claim coming from Butkowsky. NPR, the originating source, does not even bother to provide a link to the actual complaint, so in the interest of seeing it all without the "spin" of headlines and interpretations, a copy of that complaint is embedded below.
As can be read in the complaint itself, every single assertion of White House involvement, barring the meeting with Spicer a month before the article was published, came from communications and assertions by Butkowsky.
Note- It is well worth mentioning that with months on end of constant MSM howls of "Trump/Russia collusion," with no evidence, all based on the narrative that Russia was behind the Wikileaks publishing of the DNC and Podesta emails, it seems pretty much a no-brainer that if an investigator showed up at a meeting requested by a Trump supporter and revealed information that would completely collapse the MSM Russia narrative, that Spicer would indeed be "interested" in it.
Interested is a far cry from any type of "oversight" or "push" or "coordination" as the newer headlines are falsely claiming.
WHAT ARE THEY TRYING TO DISTRACT FROM?
The answer is the arrest of the Democratic IT staffer, Imran Awan, and the information he and his other family members that were working for Democratic congressional members, collected and reportedly shared the information with "foreign intelligence service, which Retired US Army Reserve Lt. Colonel Tony Shaffer, says was the Muslim Brotherhood.
We learn now that The Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT) has filed an ethics complaint against Florida Congresswoman and former DNC chair, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz for continuing to employ Imran Awan for months after criminal investigations were announced against him, saying "There is something quite amiss as to why Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz continued to use taxpayer funds to employ former technology staff member, Imran Awan, even months after he was barred from accessing the House’s computer systems and a number of her colleagues severed ties with Awan."
Wheeler, who previously worked as the Rich family’s private investigator, told WND he had arranged the meeting between House investigators looking into the alleged Russian interference in the election and members of the MPD probing the unsolved murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich.
Incidentally, during one of Wheeler’s own discussions with House investigators probing the Russia case, he claims, they asked him: What do you know about the Awan brothers?
As WND reported, Imran Awan was arrested by federal agents Tuesday at Dulles Airport in Virginia as he attempted to flee to Pakistan. Awan, who has been charged with bank fraud, headed a group of at least five IT contractors working for dozens of House Democrats, including former Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla. He is suspected of much more, including the possible theft of sensitive information from the office computers of numerous Democratic Party lawmakers and sending that data to a secret server. Awan has somehow acquired the services of one of the top power attorneys in Washington, Chris Gowen, who is deeply connected to Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Wheeler claims a thorough investigation of the Democrats’ IT hacking scandal involving the Awan brothers may reveal more information about Rich’s murder, the 2016 email breach of the Democratic National Committee and the Awan family.
“I’ve been following the arrest of Awan – this is a guy whose name came up a couple of times in my investigation as someone that I should look at,” he said in a phone call to WND Wednesday. “I never really got a chance to look at them in the investigation – but what I did do – I met with the Capitol Hill investigators.
On July 27, 2017, we at ANP warned the whole Imran Awan story, along with the connections to Seth Rich's murder was getting ready to blow wide open, and with this determined push by the MSM to not only completely ignore the details of the Awan arrest, the smashed hard-drives found on his property that investigators are now in possession of, but also the MSMs determination to hide some of the very basic, public knowledge of events surrounding Seth Rich's murder, it appears the MSM is running scared and throwing everything into one major deflection and distraction campaign.
Something huge is getting ready to break and the media is going to do everything in their power to keep their audience uninformed by creating a fake news narrative in an attempt to keep all eyes off of the Imran Awan and Seth Rich investigations.
