This article is part of the Counterlawfare Institute’s Foundational Articles series, which seeks to develop a systematic understanding of lawfare by examining the institutions, methods, and relationships that make it possible.
Every day, cranks, activists, and political operatives file lawsuits, submit complaints, issue reports, demand investigations, and make sensational allegations. Almost nobody ever hears about them. A filing proves nothing. An accusation establishes nothing. Unsurprisingly, most disappear without anyone hearing about it because the media correctly recognize that these made up stories have no inherent importance.
The White House ballroom case illustrates what happens when the media decide otherwise.
When the National Trust for Historic Preservation sued to stop construction of the ballroom, the filing instantly became national news. Major outlets repeated the organization’s claims that the project was unlawful, unconstitutional, and otherwise destructive of supposed historic norms. The mere filing of the lawsuit became a ginned-up national scandal, which was the whole point of the exercise.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation is a private nonprofit organization. Its congressional charter and official-sounding name give it the aura of public authority, although it has no governmental power or authority to decide what a president may build. Its complaint consisted of allegations written by partisan advocates, led by Greg Craig, White House counsel under Barack Obama as well as Bill Clinton’s defense counsel during the 1998 impeachment, a fact with obvious relevance to the political character of the case. A very similar situation is currently unfolding with respect to the Arch, with breathless media headlines declaring that “Veteran Groups are Challenging the Arch” when in fact it is lawfare by Democrat-aligned advocacy groups.
While nothing about these complaints required the country to care, the media made the country care. They selected two lawsuits from the thousands filed every day, conferred national importance upon them, and transformed activist groups’ allegations into evidence of presidential wrongdoing.
By the time the Supreme Court allowed construction to continue in the case of the ballroom, the lawsuit had already generated months of damaging coverage. And that was the objective from day one. The legal outcome was always beside the point because the activists behind this operation knew that the media would deliver the intended political effect long before the case was eventually thrown out.
This is media lawfare, and it extends far beyond lawsuits.
The indispensable component
Lawfare can begin with a lawsuit, prosecution, investigation, intelligence assessment, congressional hearing, ethics complaint, scientific paper, leaked memorandum, or letter from supposedly independent experts. The instrument changes, although the method is always the same.
First, political actors, or operatives with political motivations, manufacture an allegation. Then, an institution gives the allegation an official or authoritative appearance. Lastly, the media broadcasts and promotes it as a major news event or supposed scandal.
Without that final step, most lawfare operations would never escape the offices in which they were created. A complaint would remain on a court docket, a supposed expert report would circulate among activists, never to see the light of day, a leaked intelligence claim would remain an unverified claim, a so-called scientific paper written by compromised scientists would gather dust in some journal.
The media decide which allegations become scandals and which politically motivated actors will be introduced to the public as neutral authorities. They give these materials national reach, institutional legitimacy, and immediate punitive effect.
This is what separates media lawfare from ordinary bias or bad reporting. The media are part of the machinery that produces the political result. They do not merely describe the operation after it happens. They make the operation possible in the first place.
Russiagate inside the machine
Russiagate remains the clearest demonstration of media lawfare, because the media were present inside the operation before the public even knew that it existed, let alone who had created it.
In September 2016, Clinton campaign operatives at Fusion GPS arranged private meetings at the Tabard Inn in Washington between Christopher Steele and reporters from the country’s most influential news organizations. Steele had been hired by Fusion GPS, which had been retained through Perkins Coie on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
The reporters knew Steele was being presented to them by Fusion as part of an organized political effort. They also knew that he offered no documentary evidence with which they could establish his fabricated claims. Applying traditional journalistic standards, they initially would not publish the dossier, or even any of its fantasized stories, because they were both totally ludicrous and totally uncorroborated.
Consequently, despite tremendous efforts by the Clinton campaign to push it into the media, the dossier gained little public traction. The first two steps of lawfare were both present. First, the false allegations had been concocted by a political actor. Second, they were given a veneer of institutional credibility by Steele’s status as a former British intelligence officer briefing reporters and by the fact that the FBI was investigating. Yet there was still no national scandal because the media component of lawfare was missing. The media had not found a way to publish the allegations without appearing to publish what they knew was a political smear.
That changed in January 2017 when FBI Director James Comey briefed President-elect Trump about the dossier’s most outrageous and salacious claims. The fact that the briefing had taken place was then leaked to CNN’s Jake Tapper and his colleagues who then reported that Trump had been briefed on the dossier. The device was simple. CNN did not initially report that the dossier was true. It reported that the nation’s highest law enforcement officials had considered it credible enough to present to Trump.
Comey’s briefing supplied the news hook the dossier had previously lacked. CNN’s report then supplied BuzzFeed with the pretext to publish the dossier itself. The mere existence of an official briefing, which was itself concocted by Comey, was converted into apparent corroboration, even though the FBI was only investigating the allegations because political operatives had delivered them to the FBI to begin with.
For more than a year, the Clinton campaign’s role in funding the dossier remained hidden. When House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes subpoenaed Fusion GPS’s bank records and threatened to expose it, the media preempted the damage by revealing the funding themselves while emphasizing Steele’s supposed credibility and Fusion’s earlier Republican funding. That damage-control operation was itself another act of media lawfare, effectively covering up the media’s own role in laundering the dossier into public legitimacy in the first place.
The same closed loop appeared throughout Russiagate. Steele briefed Yahoo News reporter Michael Isikoff, who published the first big story about Carter Page, a totally innocent man who was dragged through the mud for no reason other than to get Trump. The FBI then cited that story in its surveillance application against Page, even though Steele was the source of both the article and the FBI allegation. The government’s interest gave the press report authority, while the press report gave the government’s application the appearance of independent confirmation.
The fraudulent Alfa Bank story followed the same model. Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann delivered allegations to the FBI while the campaign promoted them to reporters. Once the FBI began examining the material, official interest could be used to strengthen the press story. The press coverage could then be cited as further evidence that the allegation was serious.
One political allegation had entered several institutions and returned to the public disguised as corroboration from multiple independent sources.
Without the media, Russiagate would have remained a collection of made up allegations being pushed by the Clinton campaign, its contractors, and sympathetic officials. It was media participation that transformed those allegations into the dominant political narrative of the Trump presidency.
Beyond the courtroom
The Proximal Origin operation demonstrates how the same machinery can work through scientific institutions.
Scientists connected to the institutions under scrutiny for facilitating the creation of the Covid virus produced a fraudulent paper dismissing a laboratory origin. A compromised, yet outwardly reputable journal, Nature Medicine, supplied the authority and prestige. Anthony Fauci then went to the White House podium and presented the paper as independent scientific confirmation. The media repeated its conclusions as settled science, while failing to highlight the close funding ties between the authors and Fauci. Meanwhile, relying on the media’s false reports, technology platforms and so-called fact-checkers used the manufactured consensus to suppress competing evidence and stigmatize anyone who challenged it.
Without the media, Proximal Origin would have remained one highly disputed paper written by compromised scientists with conflicts and connections to the officials whose conduct required investigation. Media amplification transformed it into the official account of the pandemic’s origin and helped shield the responsible institutions from scrutiny.
The “Russian disinformation” operation during the 2020 election followed the same pattern. Politically damaging information about Joe Biden did not have to be disproved. It could simply be labeled Russian disinformation by intelligence officials, reported as Russian disinformation by the media, and suppressed as Russian disinformation by technology platforms.
The Hunter Biden laptop provided the most visible example. Despite the laptop obviously being genuine, which was easily proven right from the start by comparing emails on it to emails received or sent by parties such as Biden business associate Tony Bobulinski, fifty-one former intelligence officials, including a handful of CIA directors, issued a carefully drafted letter claiming that it was Russian disinformation. Politico then turned the fraudulent letter into the definitive headline “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.” The Biden campaign then cited the media report, while social-media companies restricted the underlying reporting on the same basis.
Even worse, the laptop was only one part of the operation. The FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force ran an operation called Round River, which categorized prominent Republicans and conservative organizations as “conduits” of Russian disinformation while identifying Joe and Hunter Biden as targets of it. According to records described in a House Judiciary Committee inquiry, this was a complete inversion of the facts, as Round River itself drew upon many confidential human sources who had provided derogatory information about Biden family dealings in Ukraine.
The FBI also gave defensive briefings to Senators Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley while they were investigating the Bidens’ foreign business connections. Johnson later disclosed that the briefings were intended to undermine the Senate investigation by portraying it as a possible conduit for Russian disinformation. Information about the briefing was subsequently leaked to the media, allowing the existence of the FBI’s warning to be used to discredit the investigation publicly.
The pattern was the same throughout. The FBI supplied an official Russian disinformation narrative. The media amplified that narrative and directed it against anyone pointing out the obvious, that there was Biden family corruption. The existence of media reports then made the FBI’s claims appear independently corroborated. Authentic evidence, congressional oversight, and politically damaging reporting could all be dismissed without being confronted on their merits.
Worst of all, none of this required a courtroom. The punishment was exclusion from public debate, and the objective was to prevent voters from considering or even learning about damaging information before an election. It could never have succeeded without the media.
Congressional hearings, inspector-general referrals, ethics complaints, open letters from former officials, and reports issued by activist organizations can all be used in the same way. Their value lies less in what they prove than in the headlines they generate. An official-looking document provides the media with a pretext to report an allegation. The resulting coverage gives the document an importance it never possessed on its own.
The process manufactures authority through circulation.
The litigation publicity machine
Activist organizations have turned this relationship into a permanent political industry.
Washington DC contains a large network of tax-exempt organizations combining litigation, political advocacy, fundraising, and communications. Democracy Forward boasts that it took the first Trump administration to court more than 100 times. Its board is chaired by Marc Elias, whose law firm openly describes its mission as helping Democrats win and progressives make change. Elias, of course, as Hillary Clinton’s campaign lawyer, was one of the masterminds behind the Russia collusion hoax.
These organizations may be nominally nonprofit but they create huge profits in other ways. They understand that the political value of a lawsuit depends heavily on the publicity it generates. A complaint creates a press release. The press release creates headlines. The headlines generate donations, political pressure, and additional litigation. A favorable ruling from a carefully selected district court produces another wave of coverage and allows an advocacy group’s theory to be described as the judgment of “the courts.”
A Harvard Law Review study counted 64 nationwide injunctions against the first Trump administration, more than half of all the injunctions in its dataset going back to 1963. Of those 64 injunctions, 59 were issued by judges appointed by Democratic presidents. The figures show how litigation against Trump developed into a systematic political industry concentrated in predictable and favorable courts. There is even a running case counter, apparently maintained as a badge of honor, that currently lists 957 legal challenges to Trump administration actions, as if the sheer volume of litigation were something to celebrate.
Yet, without the media, none of this would go anywhere. They are what distinguish this industry from the thousands of made-up, eccentric, or hopeless cases filed every year. Editors know that filing a complaint proves nothing. Indeed, most lawsuits receive no coverage because they have no public importance.
However, when an ideologically aligned organization sues Trump, the rules change. Suddenly, the filing becomes breaking news. The plaintiff is introduced as a watchdog, a civil rights organization, a preservation group, or a defender of democracy. Its political background, funding, leadership, and choice of forum receive little or no attention. Instead, the headline announces that Trump has been sued for violating the Constitution, defying Congress, destroying democracy, or attacking some vulnerable constituency.
This is how a claim made by a political actor acquires the appearance of an independent institutional judgment.
How media lawfare works
Media lawfare performs four central functions within the larger lawfare system.
It conceals provenance by separating allegations from the political actors who created and financed them.
It manufactures corroboration by circulating the same claims among campaigns, officials, intelligence veterans, scientists, activist groups, lawyers, and reporters until repetition resembles independent confirmation.
It converts procedure into judgment by treating investigations, complaints, indictments, hearings, expert letters, preliminary rulings, and supposedly scientific publications as proof of the underlying accusation.
It also creates a permanent asymmetry between an accusation and its eventual resolution. The initial claim receives breaking news alerts, front page stories, cable panels, and days of outraged commentary. A dismissal, retraction, appellate reversal, or disclosure that the evidence was false arrives months or years later and receives a fraction of the attention.
The allegation remains in headlines, search results, and public memory. For instance, a majority of the country probably still does not know that the Russiagate charges against General Flynn were entirely made up, as the Counterlawfare Institute established in its oral history interview with Flynn, because he never talked about sanctions, the thing he was accused of having done. The fact that the underlying documents, released years later, prove that Flynn was set up, has hardly registered.
This is why the ultimate outcome is often secondary to the operation. Political punishment begins immediately. The target must hire lawyers, spend money, divert time, reassure allies, and answer accusations carrying the prestige of major news organizations. Officials become afraid to implement lawful policies. Employees, donors, contractors, and political allies retreat. Other potential targets understand the warning and disassociate themselves.
The initial claims almost always eventually collapse, but by that point the process has already delivered the sentence. Flynn will never have his old life back, nor his job as National Security Advisor, nor the house he had to sell to pay legal bills.
The AI multiplier
The damage now extends beyond the immediate news cycle because artificial intelligence systems ingest the media record created by these operations.
When thousands of stories repeat a manufactured allegation, AI systems encounter what appears to be extensive corroboration. They generally cannot see that the stories originated with the same political operation, recycled the same unverified source, or relied upon one another. They reproduce the supposed consensus embedded in the published record.
Media lawfare therefore does more than mislead the public at the time. It corrupts the archives from which future accounts are generated. Today’s ginned-up scandal becomes tomorrow’s automated history.
The same closed loop continues, except the media’s false record can now be repeated indefinitely by machines that present accumulated repetition as established knowledge.
The standard the media will never adopt
In a sane media system, every politically consequential allegation would be accompanied by a basic disclosure checklist. Who originated it? Who paid for it? Which lawyers, political operatives, activist organizations, government officials, or former officials are behind it? Whose interests do they represent? Was the same material delivered simultaneously to the media, law enforcement, intelligence agencies, Congress, or the courts? What, if any, evidence has been independently verified? Why was a particular court or forum selected? What has actually been decided, and what does the target say in response?
Any honest news organization would require these questions to be answered before publishing a story involving a politically consequential lawsuit, investigation, intelligence claim, expert letter, scientific paper, or institutional report. Known political operatives and former Clinton, Obama, or Biden administration lawyers and operatives would be identified prominently – as they always are when the show is on the other foot and Trump officials are concerned – rather than hidden behind the respectable sounding names of law firms, nonprofits, expert panels, and supposedly neutral institutions. Any later dismissal, exoneration, retraction, or appellate reversal would receive coverage at least comparable to the original accusation.
Of course, the institutional media will never adopt such a standard. Doing so would expose the machinery they are trying to conceal. Every dossier story would have disclosed Steele’s relationship with Fusion GPS, the Clinton campaign’s funding, Perkins Coie’s involvement, and the reporters’ own prior contacts with Steele. Coverage of the ballroom lawsuit would have identified the National Trust as a private organization with no standing, and Greg Craig as a former Clinton and Obama lawyer. Reports on activist litigation would identify Clinton campaign lawyer Marc Elias and other political lawyers operating behind the nominal plaintiffs. Coverage of Proximal Origin would have disclosed the authors’ deep financial dependence on Fauci. Stories about alleged Russian disinformation would not have aired without at least some shred of evidence or, at a minimum, made it clear that this was merely the say so of opposing party officials with axes to grind.
Those disclosures would allow readers to recognize coordinated political operations for what they are, which is precisely why the disclosures are routinely omitted. The omissions are not incidental failures of journalism. They are an essential part of media lawfare. The illusion of independent corroboration can survive only as long as the public is prevented from seeing that the supposed watchdog, expert, government official, lawyer, and reporter are all passing around the same politically manufactured allegation.
Since the institutional media will not impose this standard upon themselves, counterlawfare must impose it from outside. Every lawfare operation must be reconstructed from its origin through its eventual resolution, with its funders, lawyers, officials, intermediaries, media partners, and institutional conflicts placed at the center of the story. Exposing those relationships is how manufactured authority is stripped away and the public record restored.
Restoring the public record
The history of every lawfare operation must be followed to its conclusion. A media system that announces every accusation and forgets every exoneration maintains a permanent ledger of uncorrected charges.
The media portray themselves as witnesses to lawfare conducted by prosecutors, intelligence agencies, scientific institutions, activist organizations, political campaigns, and courts. In reality, they are the glue that connects all these actors and converts their separate actions into a common political operation.
They supply lawfare with its reach, its legitimacy, and much of its power to punish. They determine which crank filing becomes a constitutional crisis, which partisan allegation becomes an intelligence scandal, which compromised paper becomes settled science, and which political scandal becomes Russian disinformation.
Without the media, many of these operations would never become lawfare at all. They would remain obscure complaints, unsupported allegations, disputed papers, and partisan schemes that almost nobody knew or cared about.
The media make lawfare real.
The Counterlawfare Institute exists to identify, document, and counter lawfare wherever it appears, and to build the intellectual and factual foundation needed to fight it effectively. If you believe this work is necessary, please help us continue it by supporting the Institute with a donation.
