Weaponized Scoops: New Russiagate Documents Expose Media/Government Collusion
By Paul Sperry, RealClearInvestigations
September 16, 2025
Kristina Flour
Recently declassified documents indicate that people close to former FBI Director James Comey and Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff were connected to leaks of classified information to prominent reporters designed to portray Donald Trump and his allies as being in league with Russia.
Written in 2017, the FBI documents expose how selected Washington reporters, including Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post and Michael Schmidt of the New York Times, scored a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning scoops in 2017 by repeating false and inflammatory leaks during President Trump’s first term.
Much of their reporting has been debunked – and shown to be part of a smear campaign by high-ranking officials to undermine Trump, but the identities of those leakers have remained hidden because of the government’s apparent unwillingness to expose its own and the refusal of reporters to identify the people who misled them and the nation.
Although the heavily redacted recent disclosures do not specifically identify the suspected leakers, an RCI analysis of the documents strongly suggests that people close to Comey and Schiff, among others, were feeding the reporters information to advance the Russiagate hoax.
The documents reveal a cascade of misdeeds and failures. These include the effort of government officials to create and leak misleading classified information to favored reporters and the failure of reporters to scrutinize the information they were given before rushing it into print; and the subsequent failure of federal investigators to hold anyone accountable for the breaches of security.
more/very long
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2025/09/16/weaponized_scoops_new_russiagate_documents_expose_mediagovernment_collusion_1134958.html
