Narrative Fail: Rudy As Foreign Agent Story Springs Serious Leaks
Yeah, little bit of a pun there--the leaks turn out to be in the narrative, and the leaks from "FBI sources" turn out to have been not so reliable.
I'm talking about the smear campaign against Rudy Giuliani. The WaPo and NYT were pushing the suggestion that Rudy was an unregistered agent for Ukraine, based on leaks from claimed "official" sources. This narrative was riding heavily on the claim that Rudy had received a "defensive briefing" from the FBI (or, more dramatically, had been "warned" by the FBI) that he was being targeted by the evil Russians. As if virtually any person of influence in any major government isn't targeted by other governments for influence purposes. Is that really supposed to stop our officials from talking with persons connected to foreign governments?
But the big story now is that both the WaPo and the NYT are having to consume a major helping of crow:
The retraction and correction by the Post :
“Correction: An earlier version of this story , published Thursday, incorrectly reported that One America News was warned by the FBI that it was the target of a Russian influence operation. That version also said the FBI had provided a similar warning to Rudolph W. Giuliani, which he has since disputed. This version has been corrected toremove assertions that OAN and Giuliani received the warnings.”
New York Times correction and retraction :
“Correction: May 1, 2021
An earlier version of this article misstated whether Rudolph W. Giuliani received a formal warning from the F.B.I. about Russian disinformation. Mr. Giuliani did not receive such a so-called defensive briefing.”
We'll have to see how this affects the search warrants that were executed against Giuliani, involving the seizure of electronic communication devices.
Of more interest to me is Giuliani's claim that his iCloud account had been accessed in some way by the FBI shortly after the 2020 election, i.e., on Bluto Barr's watch. Whether the access to Giuliani's iCloud account involved IDs for his contacts or content of his communications as well is unclear.
In one way or another, this all has the appearance of a Deep State attempt to intimidate Giuliani with regard to his investigation of the Biden Crime Family. We shall see how this plays out. One certainly wonders what caused this very sudden volte face and climb down from the narrative.