But. Her. EMAILS!
We all lived it. We know that the emails dominated the news cycle in the 2016 election. Sure, there were other stories - a spectacular platter of Trump outrages, Comey antics, and a little pussy-grabbing on the side. All of it obscured the real story that is finally trickling out in the mainstream press.
Donald Trump has extensive financial ties to organized crime. It’s the story we chose to research with “Poke The Bear,” since none of us were getting this information from news outlets like the NYTimes.
Remember the frustration we mentioned? Yes. We had it with the NYTimes above all other outlets. Why? Because we used their own archives to research much of Trump’s financial deals and mafia connections. Imagine that.
The more we looked, the more we wondered … what is going on here?
One would think the NYTimes would have led the charge on disclosing Trump’s history. They’re the premiere NEW YORK based, international news outlet! How could they not have the goods on the most covered New Yorker in history? Surely, they must have had journalists on the payroll, who wrote about Trump’s business history and the mafia (or, at least be able to research through their archives).
Oh look! Here’s one. Maggie’s dad. [No. We’re not making this up.]
Clyde Haberman, writes for the New York Times, and “covered Trump very sporadically in the 1980s and ‘90s.” A search of the New York Times online archive for articles by Clyde Haberman - containing the search term, “Donald Trump,” turns up 28 articles. He would know where to find everything we found. Right? Hm.
Maybe there’s another reporter who covered Trump prior to the 2015-2016 election cycle?
Yep. We found one. Maybe not always at the NYTimes, but she covered Donald for fifteen years prior.
Maggie.
In a July 2017 interview with The New Yorker Radio Hour, David Remnick asked Maggie Haberman, who had been covering Trump since the late 2000s, “When we were talking about Donald Trump, incessantly, in the eighties and nineties, when he was a figure of Spymagazine and the tabloids, you didn’t have to pay that much attention. You didn’t have to care that much. He was an amusement. But, if you look back on it now, there are a lot of people around him, from the very start, not just Roy Cohn, not just his own family but all kinds of sleazy characters, money launderers abroad and at home. He has been surrounded by some awful people, people with serious criminal records. If they ever came close to Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or many other politicians you could name, they’d be finished. How does it shape him, and how does he survive it?”
Maggie responded, “I think that people don’t know the extent of it. One of the things that I was really shocked by, covering him in 2015, was the disparity between the five-borough view—or four-borough; take out Staten Island, where he did very well—but the view of him, certainly in Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan, was that he was not a real businessman. And he, at that point, had been bankrupted several times, and he had gone on to licensing businesses and becoming a reality-TV star.”
Maggie’s response is striking because of her hand in crafting The New York Times’ coverage of Trump during that 2015-2016 election cycle. As a paper of record, its coverage helped shape the narrative of the entire election.
So, let’s review Maggie’s work. Let’s take a good look at the PR-spinning apologist in action.
The following search history of Maggie’s stories shows a distinct pattern of whataboutism: a focus on Hillary Clinton’s perceived weaknesses-which happen to be similar to the messages Russian actors were pushing to over 126 Million Americans via social media.
A search in The New York Times’ digital archive with the terms “Hillary” and “emails” for which Maggie Haberman was listed as an author, written between 1/1/2015 and 11/8/2016 returned 68 results.
Here are search results for articles published between 1/1/2015 and 11/8/2016, on which Maggie Haberman was listed as an author:
“Hillary” and “Email server” 53 results.
“Hillary” and “Benghazi” 41 results.
“Hillary” and "Gennifer Flowers" 3 results.
“Hillary” and “Lewinsky” 3 results.
“Hillary” and “Whitewater” 4 results.
“Hillary” and "Sexual assault" 8 results.
“Hillary” and “Untrustworthy” 4 results.
“Trump” and “Untrustworthy” 1 result.
“Trump” and "Sexual assault" 8 results.
“Trump” and “Bankruptcy” 3 results.
“Donald Trump” and “Roy Cohn” 1 result.
“Trump” and “Sater” 0 results. Remove Maggie as author requirement, and only 2 results are returned.
“Trump” and “Mafia” 0 results.
“Trump” and “Bayrock” 0 results.
“Trump” and “Arif” 0 results.
“Trump” and “Mashkevich” 0 results.
“Trump” and “Soho” 2 results.
“Trump” and “Apprentice” and “Racism” 0 results.
"Trump" and “Housing” and "Bias" and "FBI" 0 results.
"Trump" and "Access Hollywood" 2 results.
“Trump” and "Katie Johnson" 0 results.
“Trump” and “Epstein” 0 results.
“Trump” and “Underage” 0 results.
“Russian” and “Mafia” 0 results.
“Manafort” and “Firtash” 0 results.
“Manafort” and “Ukraine” 4 results.
“Manafort” and “Mafia” 0 results.
“Manafort” and “Yanukovych” 3 results.
Just take in those numbers. “0” results for the terms Mafia, Bayrock, Apprentice, Racism, Housing (arguably Trump’s biggest NY city scandal), Felix Sater.
This is the reporter who had the premiere access to Trump, his family, and Jared Kushner for over a decade and a half. Those search terms are some of the biggest words in Trump land. Not just from the election cycle, but long before it - and all these months after it, during his Presidency.
And for that same time – the campaign and the Presidency, Maggie cannot claim ignorance as an excuse for failing to cover Donald Trump's mob ties. When she was at The New York Post (whose owner, Rupert Murdoch, is a close friend and client of Howard Rubenstein), Maggie wrote about the Gottis, Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, and Chris Paciello.
Now, do you want the “mic-drop” moment of this entire piece? Of course you do.
It was Sammy “The Bull” Gravano who testified that the Trump Organization’s construction partner, HRH Construction, was owned by the Genovese crime family (the mob started by Lucky Luciano). And, Gravano’s testimony was given at the exact time when Howard Rubenstein was spinning personally for ‘ole Donny “Two Scoops” himself.
Let’s review Maggie’s 2015-2016 coverage again…
“Donald Trump” and the “Mafia”? ZERO search results.
Hillary Clinton scandals? Between the terms “Benghazi” and “email” alone, there are 94 Maggie Haberman hits.
94-0. It’s stunning.
