Thanks to a friend. I had forgotten this.
From The Intercept, January 25, 2017, five days after Trump's inauguration:
Though
critical of the Russia coverage, Hersh condemned Trump’s attacks on the
news media. “The attack on the press is straight out of national socialism.”
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh said in an interview that he does not believe the U.S. intelligence community proved its case that President Vladimir Putin directed a hacking campaign aimed at securing the election of Donald Trump. He blasted news organizations for lazily broadcasting the assertions of U.S. intelligence officials as established facts.
Hersh denounced news organizations as “crazy town” for their uncritical promotion of the pronouncements of the director of national intelligence and the CIA, given their track records of lying and misleading the public.
“The way they behaved on the Russia stuff was outrageous,” Hersh said when I sat down with him at his home in Washington, D.C., two days after Trump was inaugurated. “They were just so willing to believe stuff. And when the heads of intelligence give them that summary of the allegations, instead of attacking the CIA for doing that, which is what I would have done,” they reported it as fact. Hersh said most news organizations missed an important component of the story: “the extent to which the White House was going and permitting the agency to go public with the assessment.”
Hersh said many media outlets failed to provide context when reporting on the intelligence assessment made public in the waning days of the Obama administration that was purported to put to rest any doubt that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the hacking of the DNC and Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s emails.
The declassified version of the report, which was released January 7 and dominated the news for days, charged that Putin “ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election” and “aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.” According to the report, the NSA was said to have had a lower confidence level than James Clapper and the CIA about the conclusion that Russia intended to influence the election. Hersh characterized the report as full of assertions and thin on evidence.
“It’s high camp stuff,” Hersh told The Intercept. “What does an assessment mean? It’s not a national intelligence estimate. If you had a real estimate, you would have five or six dissents. One time they said 17 agencies all agreed. Oh really? The Coast Guard and the Air Force — they all agreed on it? And it was outrageous and nobody did that story. An assessment is simply an opinion. If they had a fact, they’d give it to you. An assessment is just that. It’s a belief. And they’ve done it many times.”
Hersh also questioned the timing of the U.S. intelligence briefing of Trump on the Russia hack findings. “They’re taking it to a guy that’s going to be president in a couple of days, they’re giving him this kind of stuff, and they think this is somehow going to make the world better? It’s going to make him go nuts — would make me go nuts. Maybe it isn’t that hard to make him go nuts.” Hersh said if he had been covering the story, “I would have made [John] Brennan into a buffoon. A yapping buffoon in the last few days. Instead, everything is reported seriously.”....
....MUCH MORE
In February 8's Updated—Seymour Hersh Is Back With A Big Story: "How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline" there was another story that Hersh did and that I had forgotten to mention:
UPDATE: I forgot one of his investigations, on the CIA's domestic spying program MHCHAOS, which led to the Church Committee.
Over the years we have collected quite a few links by or about Mr. Hersh. The most amazing thing, the thing that stands out, is how quick so-called journalists are to follow their FBI and CIA masters to smear, defame, and condemn 'ol Seymour.
And he just goes on his way as the pygmies of the press try to take him down.
If interested, another Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter did a four part series for the Columbia Journalism Review that was published a couple weeks ago. Hersh nailed it, six years later the CJR verified it:
"The Columbia Journalism Review Destroys The New York Times Over Their Russiagate/Trump Coverage"
