The school of dirty tricks has gotten more ingenious and nefarious in the age of the internet.
Rachel Maddow Says Forged NSA Document Being Shopped Around To News Outlets
By Rachel Shapiro, HuffPost
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow said she had a “strange scoop” to share with audiences Thursday night after receiving what she believes is a meticulously forged document sent over her tip line with the intention to discredit her.
“I feel like I need to send this up like a flare for other news organizations in particular,” Maddow said. “That’s part of what I’m intending to do here with this story tonight.”
Over the next 20 minutes, the MSNBC host discussed how her show received a document, purportedly from the National Security Agency, labeled as classified and filled with such bombshells about Russia that Maddow said if it were authentic, it would be a “gun still firing proverbial bullets.” But after careful examination, which she describes in great detail, her show deemed the document a forgery.
“We believe now that the real story we have stumbled upon here is that somebody out there is shopping carefully forged documents to try to discredit news agencies reporting on the Russian attack on our election, and specifically on the possibility that the Trump campaign coordinated with the Russians in mounting that attack,” she said.
The MSNBC host pointed to a recent report that led CNN to retract a story on Russia and led three top staffers who worked on the story to resign, as well as Vice News’ retraction of two Trump-related stories just last week
“This is news because why is someone shopping a forged document of this kind to news organizations covering the Trump-Russia affair?” Maddow asked.
The MSNBC host and her staff compared the document they received with the the leaked NSA document The Intercept published in early June, which led to the arrest of federal contractor Reality Leigh Winner.
Maddow and her staff believe the document they received was created by copying and pasting aspects of the document The Intercept published. There were additional elements that also raised red flags, Maddow said.
This sounds like something a Trump supporter would pull to derail the investigation and discredited into Trump’s collusion with Russia to interfere with the 2016 election.