While Eli Lake at Bloomberg is given the credit for breaking the story of Susan Rice’s involvement in harvesting the identities of US persons from intelligence surveillance product, that really isn’t the whole story.  The true chain of events reminds one much more of an earlier scandal involving a Democrat president and a plump and promiscuous intern.

Briefly, the story of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky had been investigated, and substantiated, by Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff. But because it was a Democrat, Newsweek decided to spike the story. Matt Drudge got wind of the story and ran with it.

Much the same happened with the Susan Rice story. Allegedly, both the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman (if you recall, she’s the reporter praised in John Podesta’s emails for being very helpful in “teeing up” stories for the Clinton campaign) and Bloomberg’s Eli Lake (who was pretty adamant #NeverTrump member during the campaign) had the Rice story (the Times denies Haberman had the story, Lake admits he had it). Neither were doing anything with it for reasons that aren’t all that clear beyond the obvious one: that the story was going to be useful to Trump.

Much like the case of the Lewinsky leak, someone let Mike Cernovich (I know, I know, Mike Cernovich) know a lot of the specifics of the story and he pushed it out on Sunday. Bloomberg ran Lake’s story on Monday without giving Cernovich so much as a nod. (If I sound bitter on this, I am because a few years ago I broke a substantial story in Maryland and got zero credit for it from any of the “real” media.)

In both cases, the people with the story weren’t interested in the truth, they were interested in pushing a particular story line and were willing to hide unfavorable information. In both cases, they will eventually look back and see that they had a significant role to play in delegitimizing their own profession.