Wikileaks just proved that not only did The New York Times collude with Barack Obama’s Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, they also proved that Snopes is more of a shill for the Democrat Party than an accurate and unbiased fact-checker.

You thought 2017 was going to end without a bang — other than the fireworks?

Think again.

After The New York Times on Saturday published a story headlined “Republican Attacks on Mueller and F.B.I. Open New Rift in G.O.P.,” WikiLeaks couldn’t stand it anymore. In a late-night post on Twitter, WikiLeaks revealed that a Times reporter used to feed State Department email updates of the stories the paper would be publishing DAYS before the stories appeared.

At the time, Hillary Clinton was the Secretary of State.

The heads-up email was intended to give State (and Clinton) time to come up with some spin for stories that may have caused problems. Or, in another possible scenario, the heads up could give the State Department time to create a diversion for the same day, thus overriding a damaging story with other news its friends in the mainstream media would happily cover instead.

The players in the WikiLeaks email are interesting. Scott Shane is the national security reporter for the Times. And the recipient of his email, Philip Crowley, was at the time the United States Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs under Clinton’s State Department. –Daily Wire

SNOPES did a hit piece on Paul Joseph Watson for making a similar claim in 2016 before the election

In October of 2016, hard-hitting, conservative, personality, Paul Joseph Watson, outed The New York Times for colluding with Hillary Clinton, by sharing an email proving that they gave her advance notice of stories they planned to print. The #FakeNews “fake news” checker, SNOPES came out in defense of the liberal propagandist publication with their “hard-hitting” and, as it turns out, very inaccurate piece to discredit Watson. Here’s an excerpt from the SNOPES piece:

On 14 October 2016, Paul Joseph Watson, a writer for the Alex Jones conspiracy web site Infowars posted on Twitter an e-mail sent between Hillary Clinton campaign staffers that had been published by WikiLeaks, along with the insinuation that it furnished proof the New York Times was colluding with the Clinton campaign by “warning” them in advance of their publishing articles about Clinton:

Under the statement “New York Times warns Hillary campaign in advance of stories they are about to publish,” Watson referenced an e-mail dated 17 February 2015 that read:

The NYT (Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman) reached out this morning to tell us that they are aware of a meeting HRC had with Senator Warren at her house back in December. They plan to write imminently, so wanted everyone to be aware that this could pop soon.

This e-mail, however, provided no evidence of improper collusion between the Times and the Clinton camp. It is standard journalistic practice for reporters to ask the subjects of their news stories for comment before publishing, and Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman were doing their due diligence as professional journalists, said Frank Girardot, a former editor with the Los Angeles News Group and author of several true crime books:

It’s standard practice for journalists to call the subjects of their stories and ask them to respond to it — in fact, it’s good practice. If you just wrote a story about somebody without getting their side of it, it would be unfair … Essentially, here are the rules. If you’re doing a story on somebody, you should call them. You should ask them for a quote. You should let them know that the story is going to be appearing in print or online or on TV, and you should get their side of whatever it is that you’re writing about. It’s fair, it’s right, and that’s what makes the difference between good journalism and shoddy, partisan crap.

Haberman and Martin published a story about a meeting between Clinton and Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren on 17 February 2015. Neither Clinton, Warren, or any of their representatives commented on the record, so Times reporters instead relied on an unnamed “Democrat briefed on the meeting” as their source.

Watson used another leaked e-mail from WikiLeaks to support his claim that the New York Times was conspiring with the Clinton campaign, one in which Clinton staffers claimed to have a “good relationship” with Haberman, then a reporter at Politico, whom they approached to “tee up” stories:

We have has a very good relationship with Maggie Haberman of Politico over the last year. We have had her tee up stories for us before and have never been disappointed. While we should have a larger conversation in the near future about a broader strategy for reengaging the beat press that covers HRC, for this we think we can achieve our objective and do the most shaping by going to Maggie.
The fact that some Clinton campaign staffers perceived they had a good working relationship with a particular political reporter is also not proof in and of itself of any wrongdoing on the reporter’s part.

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