Cernovich now seems to have anonymous sources in the White House, or close to it.
On Sunday, he claims to have received a call from a source whose number was rendered untraceable by Signal, the encryption app.
“When I get calls like that, I go, ‘Don’t tell me who you are; just tell me enough information that I know you’re legit,’ ” Cernovich told me this week.
The source, he said, informed him that, according to White House logs, Susan Rice, while serving as President Obama’s national-security adviser, had requested that several American citizens, including some Trump associates, be “unmasked.”
When intelligence analysts capture information about American citizens through incidental surveillance, the resulting intelligence reports redact the names of those citizens.
“Unmasking” means requesting the citizens’ real names.
“So the source finishes saying what they want to say, and then I go, ‘Why are you leaking this to me now?
What’s your angle? Who are you trying to get fired?’ ” Cernovich said.
“The person answered my questions, I was convinced that the story checked out, and I published it.”
That day, on the blogging platform Medium, Cernovich wrote a piece in the form of a straight-faced newspaper article, down to the public-domain photo of Rice looking crestfallen.
He then proceeded to oversell the story on Twitter (“I just broke the biggest story of the year, nbd.”) and on Periscope (“If you knew the stuff that I knew, you would have post-traumatic stress disorder”).
The White House, which has been trying to find justification for the President’s unfounded tweets accusing Obama of ordering a wiretap of Trump Tower, seized on the Susan Rice story.
Kellyanne Conway linked to Cernovich’s Medium feed on Twitter; Donald Trump, Jr., wrote, “Congrats to @Cernovich for breaking the #SusanRice story.
In a long gone time of unbiased journalism he’d win the Pulitzer, but not today!”
And, after years of trying, Cernovich finally got his first link on the Drudge Report.
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