by: Lee Smith, read in 2021

55 "As Obama's deputy national security advisor, Ben Rhodes, explained, the echo chamber included officials drawn from the administration, as well as newly minted experts from the think tank and academic communities, and the press. "They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say," Rhodes told The New York Times Magazine in May 2016"
157 "...the job of journalists is to ingratiate themselves with government officials, who used the press to leak information damaging to their rivals. The lesson for aspiring journalists is that if they stay close enough to power, they may someday break a story that will bring down a president- as Woodward and Bernstein did.

That was another reason the media could never expose the truth about the coup. National security reporters could not produce stories without the acquiescence of the intelligence community that fomented the plot. The journalists' jobs, their prestige, the welfare of their families required their loyalty to the men and women who leaked them classified information."
168 "Nunes had seen evidence of a real scandal: Obama officials had unmasked Trump associates and leaked their identities to the press. The leaks were criminal, abuses of power that violated the privacy rights of U.S. citizens. Further, using national security surveillance programs to push a political operation risked provoking a popular backlash demanding an end to the programs keeping Americans safe from terrorism. The leakers had put Americans into danger."
201 ""After weeks and months, as they realized they had nothing on Trump and Russia," says [Kashyap] Patel, "they told themselves, 'Okay, we probably misfired on this one, but we're going to keep running with this narrative because half of America believes it anyway.' And that's what split America apart."
233 "...the story was pretty straightforward: the Clintons hired a bunch of con men who got their dirty cop friends to frame Trump. The press and a corrupt prosecutor handled the cover up."
256 "The FBI's actions had done lasting damage to its reputation and convinced at least half the country that the law could be turned against them - simply for backing the wrong candidate."
262 ""Comey, Clapper, and Brennan did an incredible disservice to the agencies they ran," says Turner. "You can see them on TV today, their constant willingness to spin rumor and malign others. They didn't acquire those traits after they left government. That's how they ran those agencies, with willingness to hurt others, contrary to the purpose of those agencies and our rights."
298 "They showed that law enforcement had used a politically funded document to spy on a presidential campaign. They showed that after the election, the sting operation had turned into a coup. They showed that the press had partnered with dirty cops and political operatives to topple Trump and undo the laws, principles, and institutions that sustained the country. Nunes and his team uncovered the biggest political scandal in U.S. history: a government wide plot targeting not only the commander in chief but also the American public as a whole."
326 "In August 2019, New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet made clear that the press now believes its central purpose is to run political operations. In a meeting with the entire Times staff, Baquet praised the paper's Trump-Russia coverage. "That was a really hard story, by the way, let's not forget that. We set ourselves up to cover that story. I'm going to say it. We won two Pulitzer Prizes covering that story."

Those Pulitzers rightly belonged to the DOJ and FBI, which used the Times and the Post as platforms for a criminal campaign of leaks of classified information to prosecute an operation against a sitting president. In spite of the press's contributions, the coup failed.

"Our readers who want Donald Trump to go away suddenly thought, 'Holy shit, Bob Mueller is not going to do it,'" said Baquet. Thus it was the job of the paper's top editor to prepare the staff for the next anti-Trump campaign. Maybe, as Baquet suggested, describing the president a white supremacist the next two years would drive him from office. If not, there would be other opportunities for further operations."
328 "With the referrals, Objective Medusa was done. In exposing the truth, Nunes and his team had given the American public a true accounting of the operation to take down the president. It would be someone else's job to make sure those behind the plot were held accountable. Nunes handed the attorney general a loaded gun.

If there is no reckoning, the rift splitting the country will continue to grow. The divide is not between two political parties and their chosen candidates; rather, it is the question that Nunes and the Objective Medusa team's investigation pushed into the light: Will we be governed under one law or according to a set of privileges enjoyed by an elite confederation of the national security bureaucracy, political operatives, tech oligarchs, and their courtiers in the media industry?"