The media loves to spout off about Russian collusion. It doesn't have much to say about Qatari collusion.
Russia has been an enemy for a century. But Qatar is a close ally of Iran, a major state sponsor of terror via everything from the Muslim Brotherhood to Al Qaeda, and has ties to the 9/11 plot.
Media collusion has mainstreamed Qatar's Al Jazeera state sponsored propaganda. And from Yemen to Israel to Iran, the media largely echoes the Qatari line on everything. There are negative stories on Qatar's human rights abuses in the UK press. But you generally won't find anything negative in US outlets about the human rights violating terror state.
The Broidy email hack, in which the Republican fundraiser was targeted by Qatari hackers with alleged links to US lobbyists who allegedly altered and redistributed his emails to the media (the Washington Post in particular has become almost pathetic in its attempts to interest its lefty base in a manufactured scandal). This comes in the wake of a reported Qatari blackmail spying operation against Jewish leaders using Al Jazeera.
Now Broidy is demanding answers. And the AP is getting antsy about its Qatari collusion.
A top Republican fundraiser has subpoenaed the Associated Press for information about the source of hacked emails that formed the basis of recent reports about him, people familiar with the matter tell POLITICO.
The AP has received the subpoena from Elliott Broidy — the subject of several recent articles about his efforts to lobby President Donald Trump and the U.S. government to adopt a hard-line stance against the Persian Gulf state of Qatar — and is planning to resist it, according to the outlet’s director of media relations, Lauren Easton.
The impasse sets up a potential legal standoff over press protections at a time when political battles are increasingly being waged via leaks of hacked data.
That's true. And a major issue in media ethics. The problem is that the media has no ethics.
After fuming over Watergate, it colludes in a weekly Watergate in which stolen emails are published and redistributed.
While other outlets have provided Broidy with the original PDF documents they received containing Broidy’s emails, the AP appears to have only provided Broidy with scans of printouts of the emails, according to the person. Original PDF documents contain metadata that can be helpful for forensic analysis when attempting to trace the source of a hack, while scans of printouts lack such metadata.
The subpoena comes as part of a March lawsuit Broidy brought in a California federal court against the government of Qatar, Republican operative Nick Muzin and Muzin’s firm Stonington Strategies, which has registered as an agent of Qatar. The lawsuit accuses Qatar of hacking Broidy’s emails and alleges that Muzin aided in their dissemination. The AP is not a party to the lawsuit.
In many jurisdictions, journalists enjoy the protection of shield laws, which allow them to block demands for information about their sources. But those laws are weaker in federal court, where Broidy’s case is pending, than in many state courts.
Media shield laws are meant to shield whistleblowers. Not foreign governments.
The current media and political culture has created a bizarre environment in which foreign governments target political figures, hack their emails and then pass them around through front groups that pretend to be whistleblowers. Russia played that game with Wikileaks. But everyone is playing it now.
Media shield laws were never meant to allow media orgs to collude with foreign governments and then conceal the evidence.
If the AP got hacked emails from a foreign lobbyist in order to allow a foreign government to target a Trump supporter, then it's guilty of exactly the crime that it's been accusing Trump of.