Megyn: When I woke up Wednesday morning and checked my podcast feed, I saw the New York Times’s The Daily Podcast, which I often listen to, and they had finally gotten around to covering all of the Russiagate revelations that we’ve been doing on this show for weeks. Host Michael Barbaro brought on the New York Times investigative reporter, Michael Schmidt. I thought this is going to be really interesting because he is the reporter that we’ve learned James Comey used for leaks through his Columbia law professor friend. Comey used his Columbia law professor friends to leak to Michael Schmidt. And I remembered that Schmidt won a Pulitzer Prize for his Russiagate reporting. So I thought, okay, they’ve got a few things to acknowledge up front and then let’s hear what he has to say about all this stuff.
Of course, shockingly, the Times did not acknowledge any of that in its episode. None of it. That he is personally involved in the controversy, that he is part of it, because the media acting like lap dogs, taking what we now know was flimsy at best and, let’s face it, false intelligence and slapping it on the pages of their magazines and newspapers without checking in an effort to smear Donald Trump is one of the biggest media scandals of all time. And I would think if you’re running the Times and The Daily, Schmidt is probably realistically the last person you would want to platform as the expert on this, given the fact that he’s personally coming under fire daily on the podcasts and the websites that are actually bothering to cover this new scandal. But no, they platformed him like he was truly a trustworthy — the trustworthy, one might say — expert on Wednesday and once again misled their audience about everything on this scandal.
Here he is on a different broadcast. This is over on MSNBC. And he decided the podcast was just so good he needed to go on MSNBC to promote it. And he chose to do that on the show hosted by Nicolle Wallace. Now, Nicolle Wallace — let’s just remember who she is. She was literally part of the Bush administration. She was communications director for George W. Bush and was intimately involved in selling his policies. And now she sits there every day at four o’clock on MSNBC pretending to be some sort of neutral journalist while running the most partisan Democratic talking points you’ll hear anywhere. She is not a neutral host. She is not some straight-news anchor. She’s a political operative who has been rebranded as a TV anchor, and yet the media treats her as though she is Edward R. Murrow.
So Schmidt goes on her show, knowing he’s going to get nothing but softballs, and he presents himself as if he’s just the neutral explainer of all things Russiagate. But let’s not forget: this is the guy who carried water for James Comey, who was a willing participant in pushing a narrative that turned out to be false. And now he’s out there again, trying to spin, trying to minimize, trying to make the Times and himself look like they weren’t central players in one of the most embarrassing chapters in modern journalism.
And it’s incredible to me that The Daily, which reaches millions of listeners, would present this as if they’re finally giving you the inside story — when in fact what they’re giving you is damage control, narrated by the very person who ought to be answering for his role in creating the false narrative in the first place. No acknowledgment of his Pulitzer Prize being awarded for work that is now under serious scrutiny. No acknowledgment of the leaks. No acknowledgment that they were wrong. Just more spin, more gaslighting of their audience.
And this is what drives people crazy about the media. They never admit fault. They never just come out and say, you know what, we screwed up, we got used, we let our hatred of Trump cloud our judgment, and we reported things that weren’t true. Instead, they double down. They re-platform the same people. They give you the same talking points, dressed up as “new revelations,” when really it’s just the same old nonsense recycled.
Meanwhile, the people who actually did the hard work of uncovering what really happened — the Durham Report, investigative reporters outside the mainstream, independent podcasters — they get dismissed as partisan hacks or conspiracy theorists. But as time goes on, it’s becoming clearer and clearer who was telling the truth and who was running cover. And unfortunately, the Times, MSNBC, CNN, and so many others were running cover. They were not telling you the truth.
They treated Trump as if he were guilty from day one. The FBI opened an investigation with almost no evidence, based on gossip, political opposition research, and bad sources. They took the Steele Dossier—a collection of unverified, unsubstantiated allegations dug up by a British spy, paid for by the Clinton campaign through Fusion GPS—and they used it. They attached it as an annex to the intelligence community assessment. They used it to get FISA warrants. They used it to justify surveillance of an American presidential campaign. And the CIA Director at the time, John Brennan, overruled his own seasoned Russia experts, saying of the dossier: “it rings true.” That’s what carried the day. That’s not analysis—that’s bias.
And the media amplified it. They ran with it. They won Pulitzers off it. They smeared Trump for years, undermined his presidency, changed his relationship with Russia, and altered U.S. foreign policy—all based on bad intelligence and partisan spin. Brennan called Trump “treasonous.” Clapper fed innuendo to the press. The Times, the Washington Post, cable news—they all treated this fiction as fact.
Meanwhile, dissenting voices were silenced or ignored. Analysts within the intelligence community who said, “this doesn’t add up,” were overruled. Anyone who questioned whether Russia-gate was being exaggerated was branded as a Trump stooge. The Clinton campaign framed Trump as a Russian agent. The FBI and CIA ran with it. The media rubber-stamped it. And the public was left with the false impression that the President of the United States was compromised by Moscow.
Think about it: Hillary Clinton’s campaign hires Christopher Steele. Steele feeds his wild theories to the FBI in early July. By the end of that month, the FBI opens its investigation into Trump. They use Steele’s allegations as source material. They hide from the FISA court that Steele was paid by the Clinton campaign. And all the while, the press prints it as gospel.
It was agenda-driven from the start, and it remains agenda-driven. The people who pushed this—whether in government, in the media, or in the campaigns—have never really been held accountable. Instead, they’ve been rewarded with book deals, TV contracts, and in Schmidt’s case, a Pulitzer Prize.
They undermined Trump’s presidency, they misled the American people, and they damaged trust in our institutions. And to this day, outlets like the Times refuse to admit the scale of their failure. Instead, they platform the very people most compromised in the scandal, and they pretend it was all just an honest mistake. It wasn’t. It was a deliberate, coordinated effort to delegitimize a sitting President.
That’s the truth about Russia-gate, and no matter how much the Times tries to spin it, the record is clear.
ChatGPT: Stephen Turner would likely treat Russiagate—whether framed as Obama-era “treason” by MAGA voices or as a “nothingburger” by mainstream experts—as a case study in the politics of expertise and epistemic closure.
From his work in The Politics of Expertise (2013) and Making Democratic Theory Democratic (2023), Turner emphasizes a few key dynamics that map directly onto this clash:
Experts as Partisan Actors
Turner notes that expert claims are never “neutral” in the way liberal democracies imagine. In Russiagate, intelligence officials, journalists, and legal analysts all positioned themselves as authoritative voices. But their judgments were shaped by institutional loyalties and ideological leanings, not purely by detached fact-finding. To Turner, this isn’t aberration—it’s the normal state of expertise.
Epistemic Closure
Competing camps enforce their own boundaries of acceptable discourse.
For mainstream outlets like The New York Times, doubting the “collusion story” early on marked one as unserious or even pro-Trump.
For MAGA voices, dismissing the scandal as trivial was treated as complicity in a deep-state cover-up.
Turner would say both sides rely on consensus policing, not just evidence—mirroring his remarks on the academic reaction to The Bell Curve.
The Collapse of Neutrality
A liberal democratic state is supposed to adjudicate between knowledge and ideology. Russiagate illustrates Turner’s warning that when knowledge itself is politicized, neutrality collapses. Government bodies (DOJ, FBI) and media institutions could no longer appear as neutral arbiters—they became combatants.
Credibility as a Scarce Resource
Turner stresses that public trust in experts is a fragile, depletable resource. Russiagate’s conflicting narratives burned through enormous reserves of credibility. Intelligence agencies, the press, and political elites all came out with diminished authority. From a Turnerian angle, this is the long-term cost of weaponizing expertise for partisan ends.
If he were commenting directly, Turner wouldn’t resolve the empirical truth of Russiagate. Instead, he’d highlight the structural lesson: when rival expert communities lock into mutually exclusive “truths,” what matters is not which side is right, but how the system of expertise itself loses legitimacy.
He has a sustained argument that there are no Archimedean points of neutrality. That’s where he makes the “creation science / race & IQ” asides you flagged — showing that credibility judgments about knowledge vs. ideology are socially enforced, not neutral.
He also talks about the way professional and governmental bodies use consensus as closure to decide who counts as an expert. That’s a direct analogue to how Russiagate “experts” were credentialed in MSM vs. discredited in MAGA outlets.
Making Democratic Theory Democratic
He doubles down on credibility as a political resource. Experts don’t just bring facts; they also impose frames of legitimacy that foreclose rival interpretations.
He argues democratic theory needs to recognize this dynamic: expert claims are never purely epistemic, they are political moves embedded in institutions.
That maps perfectly onto Russiagate: MSM leaned on “expert consensus” to foreclose MAGA interpretations, while MAGA built an alternative credibility network (e.g., Barr, Durham, independent journalists) that Turner would see as a counter-closure.
