What We Already Know Beyond All Doubt Is That The Media Maintains A Double Standard That Favors Even The Most Corrupt Republicans

As Rachel Maddow pointed out last night, the now disputed story in BuzzFeed was only the most sensational of the scandals reported about Trump, his campaign and his regime last week.   It was a confusing and exhausting week of those.  Now that the Special Council's office has denied, in vague terms, that they were in possession of evidence that Trump ordered his then attorney Michael Cohen to lie to the congress, the veracity of BuzzFeed and, by artificial amplification of what might be a single, though spectacular, faux pas by one news organization, the entire investigation into the massive Trump scandal in which so many key figures have pled guilty already, is being attacked. 

I have to admit that I was so bewildered by the thick forest of decaying trees and falling widow makers from them from last week I wasn't giving the BuzzFeed one my full attention and have been taking a few hours to try to catch up.  One of the most interesting things I read this morning was at Politico (of all places)

Former federal prosecutor and current George Washington University law professor Randall Eliason surmised that BuzzFeed’s likely source was FBI agents working the Southern District of New York case against Cohen. For one thing, Mueller doesn’t leak and FBI agents, who have been known to leak, “would know about all things Cohen, including materials seized during search warrants at his home & office that may be some of ‘cache’ of supporting evidence,” Eliason tweeted. If Eliason is right, that might explain some of the confusion: The BuzzFeed story could be right about what the Southern District had concluded about Cohen’s behavior but have overshot what Mueller’s team thinks. Remember, the Friday evening statement from Mueller doesn’t say the BuzzFeed account is all wet, just that it’s inaccurate in its description of what the Mueller office has learned.

Is that what happened?  Will it matter now that the idea that BuzzFeed got it wrong is the story?

What I find most interesting in this is how this IS the story this morning in exactly the way that more than a quarter of a century of false reporting about the criminality of Hillary Clinton, reported by many, many news operations, from the sewer that FOX and Breitbart reside in up to the loftier heights of the New York Times has never been as much of a story.   It's a rule in American journalism that any slander against any Democrat, everything from staffer to presidents, is nothing much to be bothered with but one POSSIBLY inaccurate story told about the most corrupt of Republicans is treated as a scandal.