‘US needs free press, but has media subservient to Clinton-Obama interests’

There is a long-standing collusion between the mainstream media and the people in power loyal to the Clintons and the Obamas, who tried to put Hillary Clinton in power as president, investigative journalist Charles Ortel told RT.

On December 30, WikiLeaks published an e-mail that, it said, showed how the New York Times was providing the State Department and Hillary Clinton with advanced warnings about potentially damaging stories.

RT spoke to political analyst Charles Ortel about the NYT revelations.

RT: Do you expect more media and Clinton ‘collusion’ stories to break? Or is this simply just one New York reporter doing this? Is it bigger than that?

Charles Ortel: I think it is much bigger than that. What we’ve really had here – long-standing collusion between the mainstream press and certainly the Obama and the Clinton people in power, trying to put Hillary Clinton back in power as president. When we really go and dig deeply in the facts that have long been concealed but now are coming out, we’re going to find out exactly why Barack Obama was willing to let the Secretary of State operate from a secret office in New York with secret servers at home in Chappaqua and in her Washington DC place, using secret e-mail accounts. Now, it seems, mishandling classified information. That is a very serious set of affairs that began, I would argue, on January 21, 2009 …We need to understand exactly what information Hillary Clinton, [former Clinton aide] Huma Abedin, and others had, and how they sent it around the world, and who may have gotten the access to that information. That’s a big story.  

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RT: Team Clinton and the State Department were reportedly given extra time to control revelations. In terms of the latter, how would Washington go about controlling any potential damage?

CO: Now it is virtually impossible to control it, because you’ve got so many elements. You’ve got a Trump administration seated now, with Trump people at most of the key jobs. You’ve got newly energized, maybe not mainstream press, but independent journalism going at this. Organizations like yours and many inside and outside this country digging deeply, not accepting the supposed facts that have been solved in the past. And the conflicts are obvious. The people who were put into the Obama White House – many of them were Clinton holdovers, who were allies at the deep state. They didn’t want this deep state apparatus exposed, they operated above the law, I would argue – certainly from January 2009 until Trump was inaugurated, and many of them have a lot to lose. So, they wanted to try to cover it up, but they are not going to be able to.   

RT: Do you know of any instances when this has actually occurred and the US has successfully handled potentially damaging stories. How frequently does this happen?

CO: The reality is that the President of the US by definition makes big news. And if you cut off access to top people, you’re not going to be very successful as a mainstream media person. So you’re able to give favors to journalists you want to reward. You’re able to punish those who you don’t want to see get very far. There is ample, extensive evidence of that in WikiLeaks Podesta emails talking back and forth – the friendly journalist list that is referred-to – that is what [Bill] Clinton did so effectively, when he was the President during impeachment [proceedings] and afterwards. That is what Obama learned how to do well, or he tried to do well, when he was president. We really would be a lot better off everywhere with a free, independent, determined, impartial press. Instead, it seems we have one that is subservient to the Clinton-Obama interest and maybe to the Bush interest.