Trump's allies target journalists whose cover is deemed hostile to the White House

WASHINGTON – An informal network of conservative agents, allied to the White House, is pursuing what they describe as an aggressive operation to discredit media outlets deemed hostile to President Trump by publishing damaging information about journalists.

This is the last step of a long-term effort led by Mr. Trump and his allies to reduce the influence of legitimate reporting. Four people who were familiar with the operation described how it worked, saying it had created potentially embarrassing social media publications and other public statements from hundreds of people working for some of the country's leading news agencies.

The group has already published information about CNN, Washington Post and The New York Times journalists – three media that have aggressively investigated Trump – in response to reports or comments deemed unjust by the military's allies. White House to Mr. Trump and his team. or harmful to his prospects of reelection.

Officials have closely examined more than a decade of public publications and statements by journalists, according to sources close to the operation. According to the population, only a fraction of what the network claims to have discovered has been made public. Further information is to be revealed on the eve of the 2020 elections. The research would extend to family members of journalists active in politics, as well as to liberal activists and other political opponents of the president.

It is not possible to independently assess claims regarding the amount or potential importance of the hardware that the pro-Trump network has assembled. Some people involved in the operation have stories of bragging and exaggeration. And those who want to describe the techniques and goals may try to intimidate journalists or their employers.

But material published so far, though sometimes devoid of context or misleading, has proven to be genuine, and much of it has been professionally prejudicial to its targets.

It is clear from the cases to date that Arthur Schwartz, a 47-year-old combative conservative consultant, friend and informal advisor to Donald Trump Jr., the eldest son of the president. Mr. Schwartz has worked with some of the most aggressive agents of the right, including Trump's former advisor, Stephen K. Bannon.

"If @nytimes thinks that resolves the issue, we can expose some of their other bigots," said Schwartz. tweeted Thursday, in response to an apology tweet from a Times reporter, whose anti-Semitic messages on social media had just been revealed by the operation. "A lot more where it comes from."

The information uncovered by the operation was commented and disseminated by Trump administration officials and the re-election campaign, as well as by conservative activists and right-wing news outlets such as Breitbart News. In the case of the editor of the Times, the news was first published by Breitbart, then amplified on Twitter by Donald Trump Jr. and, among others, by Katrina Pierson, senior advisor to the Trump campaign, and quickly made the subject of an interview with Breitbart. with Stephanie Grisham, Press Secretary and Director of Communications at the White House.

The White House Press Office stated that neither the President nor anyone at the White House was involved in the operation, nor aware of the operation, and that neither the House -Blanche nor the Republican National Committee were involved in the financing of the operation.

The Trump campaign said she was not aware and was not involved in the effort, but suggested that it served a worthy purpose. "We do not know anything about it, but it's clear that the media has a lot of work to do to clean up their home," said Tim Murtaugh, communications director for the campaign.

The campaign is part of Trump's long-standing efforts to delegitimize critical reporting and call the media "enemies of the people." The president has worked tirelessly to reduce the credibility of the media and to portray them as politically motivated opponents.

Journalism, he says in a tweet last week, "is nothing more than a perverse propaganda machine for the Democratic Party".

The operation compiled social media posts from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, and stored images of these publications that can be published even if the user deletes them, said people familiar with this effort. One of them claimed that the operation had uncovered potentially "controllable" information about "several hundred" people.

"I'm sure there will be more scalps," said Sam Nunberg, former assistant to Mr. Trump, a friend of Mr. Schwartz.

Mr. Nunberg and others who were aware of the campaign described the campaign as intended to expose what they saw as the hypocrisy of the mainstream media that recounted the president's inflammatory language about race.

"Two can play this game," he said. "The media have long targeted Republicans with a deep dive into their social media, seeking to caricature all Trump conservatives and voters as racists."

But using journalistic techniques to target journalists and news organizations in retaliation – or warning not to pursue – critical coverage of the president is fundamentally different from the well-established role of the media in controlling people in positions of power.

"It's clearly about retaliation, it's clearly an attack, it's clearly not journalism," said Leonard Downie Jr., editor-in-chief. Head of The Post from 1991 to 2008. The tension between a president and the media covering him is nothing new, Mr. Downie added. But a large-scale organized political effort to intentionally humiliate journalists and other people who work for media is.

"It's one thing for Spiro Agnew to call all members of the press" negativism moguls ", he said, referring to the famous criticism of the former vice president on the cover of President Richard M Nixon by the reporters. "And another thing to investigate individuals in order to embarrass them publicly and put their job in jeopardy."

A. G. Sulzberger, publisher of The Times, said in a statement that such tactics were pushing the president's campaign against a free press to a new level.

"They are trying to harass and embarrass anyone affiliated with major news agencies who are asking tough questions and bringing uncomfortable truths to light," Sulzberger said. "The purpose of this campaign is clearly to intimidate journalists into their work, which includes serving as a means of controlling power and exposing wrongdoing when they occur." . The Times will not be intimidated or silenced. "

In a statement, a CNN spokesman said that when government officials, "and those who work for them, threaten to retaliate against journalists and act as a means of repression, it is a flagrant abandonment of democracy for a very dangerous act ".

The operation targets the media using one of the most effective political combat arms: extensive and painstaking research in public archives of opponents to find contradictions, controversial views or toxic affiliations. The liberal group Media Matters for America helped to pioneer a scrutiny of public statements by conservative media personalities.

Conservative operator James O Keefe distorted this concept in a way that does not conform to traditional journalistic ethics: he used fake identities, developed cover stories and undercover videos to trap journalists and publish embarrassing, often misleading statements aimed at undermining the credibility of what he considers. media oriented towards the liberals.

In the case of the pro-Trump network, research on journalists is being deployed in the political interest of the White House. It targets not only high-level journalists who challenge the administration, but all those who work for a news agency that members of the network consider to be hostile to Mr. Trump, no matter how important this job is to the cover of his presidency. . And it is explicitly used as compensation for the cover.

Some journalists have been warned that they themselves or their media outlets may be targets, giving the impression that the campaign was partly aimed at deterring them from being aggressively hedged and imposing a sanction. to the publication of an article.

A lawyer by training, Schwartz is very interested in family members of the president by becoming one of their most aggressive supporters, known for harassing and threatening reporters and others who, in his view, have hurts Trumps.

He publicly went after the Republicans whom he regards as disloyal, including the former White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, about whom he has admitted spreading an unsupported rumor. He's called a "troll on Twitter", which he's boasted about Be aware of, or to have access to, damaging information about dozens of CNN and Times reporters who could be deployed if these media contravened Mr. Trump or his allies.

The tactics of the operation were exposed last week, apparently in response to two Times articles that angered Mr. Trump's allies. The newspaper's editorial board on Wednesday issued an editorial accusing Trump of fomenting anti-Semitism, and the press room released Thursday morning a profile of Ms. Grisham, the new White House press officer, containing unflattering details about his career.

One person involved in the effort said that pro-Trump forces, conscious in advance of Ms. Grisham's coverage, were willing to react. Early Thursday morning, shortly after the profile was posted, Breitbart News published an article documenting anti-Semitic and racist tweets written by Tom Wright-Piersanti a decade or so ago. He was at college in college and has since become an editor at the Times & Politics office. The Times said it was reviewing the issue and considered the publications "as a blatant violation of our standards."

Mr. Schwartz tweeted a link before Breitbart's piece before 7pm, which Donald Trump Jr. retweeted to his 3.8 million subscribers – the first of a dozen times where the president's son shared the article or its content. Other prominent Republicans, including Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, also stressed the report.

In his article, Breitbart quotes several individuals or groups with close ties to Schwartz, including Richard Grenell, Trump's ambassador to Germany, and the Zionist organization in America. It was written by Matthew Boyle, political editor of the Washington site, whose relationship with Mr. Schwartz began when Mr. Bannon ran the website.

In his article, Boyle was referring to Grisham's profile in The Times, which he called "White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham's attack". Mr. Wright-Piersanti did not participate in writing the article about Ms. Grisham.

The tweets revealed in the Breitbart article quickly spread to the conservative favorites of the president and his allies, including the radio shows of Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin.

Mr. Wright-Piersanti is excused on Twitter Thursday morning and the offensive tweets removed. Mr. Schwartz then advised that he had other damaging information about the Times employees.

Mr. Wright-Piersanti, 32, said that tweets posted when he was a student on Twitter, mostly from personal acquaintances, were "my futile attempts at nervous humor to try to get up." soar my friends.

But he said: "They are not funny, they are clearly offensive," adding, "I feel deeply ashamed for them and I am really sincerely sorry for writing that."

He said that he had forgotten the tweets while he was starting a career in journalism.

"For my generation, the generation that has reached its majority on the Internet, all of the youth mistakes you've made are kept in digital amber, and no matter how much you change maturity and development, that's all." is always there, to discover. Said Mr. Wright-Piersanti.

Like Mr. Wright-Piersanti, the pro-Trump network also targets young people who grew up with social media and wrote the messages in their teens or early twenties, in most cases before becoming professional journalists.

A week after a White House reporter for CNN quarreled with Mr. Trump during a press conference, Mr. Schwartz highlighted a tweet from this 2011 reporter, when He was at the university, using an anti-gay insult. Other similar tweets quickly surfaced and the journalist apologized, even though Mr. Schwartz continued to annoy him on Twitter.

Over the last few months, Schwartz has put forward a nearly ten-year-old tweet in which a Post reporter had ambiguously repeated an insult used by a politician.

In March, Mr. Schwartz tweeted a link to a Breitbart article, written by Mr. Boyle, about a Business Insider journalist whose Instagram account contained anti-Trump references and a photo of the journalist protesting against President.

In July, around the time CNN published an article exposing old messages written by a person named by Trump, suggesting that Barack Obama was a Muslim whose loyalty to the United States was involved, Mr. Schwartz resurfaced the 2011 anti-Semitic tweets written by an editor CNN photo. Mr. Schwartz suggested that a CNN journalist specializing in problematic archival content research should "examine the social media activities of your employees".