'Their' ABC’s Trump mania and the hatchet job on Carter W Page

19 September 2019, "Is Spygate Bigger Than Watergate?", was a striking contrast to the ABC hostile "line" on the President and his administration. First, it gave voice to the case that, whatever else might truthfully be said about Trump, the "Russiagate" spectacle was, from the outset, something that belonged in the Political Theatre of the Absurd. Secondly, the voice was that of a prominent member of the actual Left in the US, Aaron Maté, a regular contributor to The Nation magazine and whose online news show "Push Back" is part of the investigative journalism website, The Gray Zone. Maté and others on the actual Left had been contending throughout the Trump administration that "Russiagate" was a preposterous crusade resulting from the Democrats' unwillingness to accept that the Trump victory was the inevitable outcome of their nomination of Hillary Clinton in 2016, and that the attempts to drive Trump from office were likely to ensure his re-election in 2020.

Recalling the ABC's response to President Trump's "without evidence" remark in mid-2018, there was, in truth, ample evidence. It seems unlikely that anybody at the ABC has read and considered the redacted public version of the December 2019 report of the review by the Inspector General of the DOJ (appointed by the Obama Administration) into aspects of the FBI investigation of Dr Page. Apart from its other findings affecting Dr Page, it records the fact that during his time in Russia, Dr Page had been actively assisting the US intelligence community (likely the CIA) as a registered "operational contact", and had informed US authorities that he had been sounded out by Russian intelligence.

The Australian national broadcaster's unquestioning anti-Trump fixation and associated gullibility is demonstrated in chapter and verse starkness in what the Inspector General uncovered about the FBI's conduct in connection with the DOJ applications to the FISA Court for the surveillance authorizations in respect of Dr Page. They include the following:

• Each of the four DOJ applications to the FISA Court was tainted by serious misconduct which was antithetical to the DOJ's heightened duty of candour it owed the Court;
• The FBI had misled the Court by supplying information to the DOJ which was false, unsupported or which contradicted information held by the FBI or DOJ, by withholding material information detrimental to its case, by withholding information detrimental to the case for believing that Dr Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power, and by exaggerating the extent to which Christopher Steele's reporting had been corroborated, and by falsely representing that it had been used in criminal proceedings;
• An FBI lawyer had altered an e-mail message stating that Dr Page was a source for another US intelligence agency to state that he was not.

The ABC's ongoing anti-Trump partisanship is on display in its abject failure to report in full, first, on the Inspector General's reports and, secondly, on the FISA Court's decisions in its ongoing response to the IG's report about the FBI misconduct and the consequential injustice inflicted on Dr Page by the DOJ's tainted applications to the Court.

And now that failure is being aggravated by the ABC's lack of detailed reporting of the recent announcement by the DOJ of its intention, consequent upon revelation of further FBI misconduct, to discontinue the prosecution of former Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, and the pending subsidiary controversy concerning the orders made by the US District Court in Washington DC in response to the DOJ notification.