By Nicholas Fondacaro | April 5, 2019

The liberal media had their hopes raised of seeing President Trump jailed by the recent dubious reports by The New York Times and The Washington Post claiming that members of the Special Counsel felt Attorney General Barr mischaracterized their findings. Few in the liberal media would dare to admit the questionable nature of the sourcing of their reporting, but that’s what MSNBC host Chuck Todd did during Thursday’s MTP Daily.

To his credit, Todd began his program by pointing out their use of sources that refused to go on the record:

This is how the evidence against Mr. Trump was characterized in all of these reports, which, by the way, are all based on anonymous sources. To The Times it was “more damaging for the President than Mr. Barr explained.” To the Post, it was “alarming and significant.” And to us here at NBC News, it was “compelling.”


“But, folks, we preached caution when Barr told us what Mueller’s evidence really meant. So, we're going to preach caution in this case as well,’ he added.

One of his guests for the evening was Rosalind Helderman, one of the authors of The Washington Post report. Todd’s first question to her regarded their use of anonymous sources:

How nervous are you that we're basing all of this on anonymous -- or people that don't want to go on the record? You know who they are. But we're in this situation in the same way that Barr put us in there in the first place where we're all flying a little blind here.

Helderman’s answer didn’t instill the greatest confidence in their reporting. She said they trusted they “accurately describing the attitudes of some members of the Mueller team,” but they didn’t have “confidence about exactly what's in that report and how damning or not damning it is, because we haven't seen it a that's just a weird place to be.”

Todd then asked NBC intelligence and national security reporter Ken Dilanian about dealing with his sources. “And it's even more dramatic than just they won't go on the record, we're getting this secondhand,” He shockingly admitted. “We're not getting this directly from people who worked for Robert Mueller. We’re getting this from people who spoke to those people.”

A few minutes later, the MSNBC host even conceded that Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani made a “credible” in noting how, “if there was a significant difference, Mueller would have corrected it as he did with the false BuzzFeed report.”

“The problem that Democrats have of pushing against that statement....is that it is all anonymous people,” Todd lamented. “All of us are admitting – Our organization, yours, the Post. It is people who are talking to people who’ve talked to reporters. Right? We're playing two levels of telephone.”

It’s highly disturbing that they would sprint to use secondary tertiary sources to report on something so consequential. Oh, how far the media had fallen.

https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/nic...lephone-mueller