Get Carter was the name of the film, an old crime drama starring Michael Caine as a man returned home to investigate his brother’s death in Newcastle, England. Because he is asking too many questions, very quickly it is Carter himself who becomes the target of the bad guys.
The name of the film occurs as one watches longtime journalist Sara Carter dig in relentlessly to the Trump/Russia collusion story – only to find out that the trail of collusion involves the Hillary Clinton campaign and pro-Hillary FBI higher-ups who loathed Donald Trump so much they spent their time texting and plotting how to do in his candidacy – and then his presidency.
A trip to the Carter website reveals headlines like these:
FBI informant on Uranium One Breaks Silence
New Report Exposes Strzok and Page Texts
Referral Suggests Clinton Friends Were “Feeding” British Spy Information
Nunes, HPSCI Continue Oversight While Detractors Implicated in Transparency Attack
Intelligence Committee Reveals Weakly Sourced Doc Used for FISA Application
Attorney For FBI Informant Presses DOJ For Leak Investigation
Suffice to say, these are not the kinds of stories one finds in the mainstream media. Thorough, detailed, they are journalism at its best, the 21st-century shoe-leather reporting once made famous by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as the two young Washington Post reporters uncovered the massive story their more experienced, Establishment seniors in journalism missed.
Carter comes by her quite serious reporting credentials the only way one can get them – by working endlessly at her craft
As famously portrayed in the Hollywood version of the Woodward and Bernstein book All the President’s Men, one subject of an intense investigation was Nixon Attorney General John Mitchell. Mitchell, contacted by phone, listened to Bernstein ask his question about a new scoop involving a secret fund that was run by five Nixon campaign aides and was used to investigate Democrats. (Sound familiar?) The Post would write the moment this way:
“Two weeks later, a seminal Bernstein and Woodward article appeared on Page 1 of The Post. They had dug up information that there was a secret fund at CRP that was controlled by five people, one of whom was then-Attorney General John Mitchell, and which was to be used to gather intelligence on the Democrats. Thus the story reached a new level.
“In an effort to check it out, Bernstein called Mitchell directly, reaching him at a hotel in New York, where Mitchell answered the phone himself. When Carl told him about the story, Mitchell exploded with an exclamation of ‘JEEEEEEESUS,’ so violent that Carl felt it was ‘some sort of primal scream’ and thought Mitchell might die on the telephone. After he’d read him the first two paragraphs, Mitchell interrupted, still screaming, ‘All that crap, you’re putting it in the paper? It’s all been denied. Katie Graham’s gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that’s published. Good Christ! That’s the most sickening thing I ever heard.’”
Eerily, Carter today is pursuing a story that, as with Watergate, has a presidential campaign using funds to, as the Post put it back then, “gather intelligence” on the opposition. In today’s case its the Hillary Clinton campaign paying an intermediary, Fusion GPS, to pay the ex-British spy Christopher Steele for a Trump dossier concocted by Russians. One might say the more things change, the more they stay the same. You might call it Tales from the Deep State.
In the words of House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes to Fox’s Maria Bartiromo:
“The collusion is right in front of our eyes. Just because you hire a lawyer who hires a firm who hires a former British spy to make contacts with Russians – that means that you were colluding with the Russians.”
Exactly. And as with that fury from John Mitchell dumped on Carl Bernstein, today’s subjects of Carter’s investigations are not happy with her sleuthing. Except that this time the media is playing defense for the campaign in question – and making Carter their target.
Take this Get Carter-style piece over there in Mediaite. Written by Justin Baragona, who migrated to Mediaite from the far Left PoliticsUSA, the headline reads:
Who Is Sara Carter, Hannity’s Go-To Reporter on the Real Russia Scandal?
Notice the italicizing of the word “Real”? As in, pay no attention to Carter’s reporting because its all made up. The “Real” story is supposedly Trump colluding with Russia to steal the 2016 election, a story that after a year-plus has produced no evidence whatsoever. But thus speaks a Leftist journalist reporting on Sara Carter. (But I repeat myself as so many journos are Leftists. Which is why they were enraptured by Kim Jong Un’s tyrannical sister at the Olympics – a story unto itself!)
In other words, Baragona’s real complaint is that Carter’s reporting is off script from that of the most of the rest of the mainstream media. And the fact that Hannity – say again – gasp! – Sean Hannity – is featuring her reporting on Fox only says to the liberal media that what Carter has thus far uncovered has to be discredited. Why?
Sara Carter Website – SaraACarter.com
It’s one thing for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to say, as he did the other weekend on Bartiromo’s Sunday Morning Futures, that “We have a very serious problem of corruption at the very top of our judicial system and our FBI system.” But it is another thing entirely to have serious journalist Carter out there day after day after day doing the hard reporting that proves both Nunes and Gingrich to be right.
Carter comes by her quite serious reporting credentials the only way one can get them – by working endlessly at her craft. She grew up in Saudi Arabia as the daughter of a Marine and a Cuban immigrant. She speaks fluent Spanish, and as her official biography at her own website notes Carter “has traveled extensively throughout the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and Mexico.” Her focus has been as a national security correspondent, in which capacity she has covered the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq. She has worked for journalistic outlets ranging from the Los Angeles News Group to The Washington Times, The Washington Examiner and Sinclair Broadcasting’s Circa, where she was the senior national security correspondent. She is now a Fox News contributor. Carter has also written several exclusives, as her site notes, for USA Today, US News World Report, and Arutz Sheva in Israel. In the course of doing all this, her reporting has been recognized with both national and international journalism awards.
Doubtless, it is precisely this kind of serious journalism background that produces her on-going scoops. Which in turn are clearly starting to irritate liberal media types who, after a year-plus of insisting there was Trump-Russia collusion to win the 2016 election have repeatedly come up empty-handed. While Carter, on the other hand, is continually unearthing serious evidence of Russian collusion – with the FBI and the Clinton campaign.
The left-leaning Baragona ’s Mediaite story tries to imply that Carter’s reporting is not used by the “straight news” section of Fox, something belied by this December report on a Carter appearance on the straight news section of the Fox website “Fox News Insider.” The headline:
Sara Carter on Reports of Anti-Trump FBI Agents: Top Level of FBI Is in ‘Tatters’
For the record, this December story of Carter’s proved to be spot on. As noted here at National Review by Victor Davis Hanson:
“Director Comey was fired. Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was forcibly retired. FBI lawyer Lisa Page was reassigned and demoted. FBI general counsel James Baker resigned. Senior agent Peter Strzok was reassigned and demoted. The former FBI director’s chief of staff, James Rybicki, resigned. Mike Kortan, FBI assistant director for public affairs, took retirement. Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr was reassigned and demoted. Justice Department’s counterintelligence head, David Laufman, resigned. A cadre of others “unexpectedly” have left, allegedly (or conveniently) for private-sector jobs. Such career implosions do not happen without cause.”
Exactly. If that is not the personification of an FBI in tatters, nothing is. Carter had the story and as usual was one hundred percent accurate.
One would think that before she signed on with Fox, Carter’s continuous scoops would lead to multiple job offers from other cable and broadcast news divisions. But you would be wrong. I checked with Ms. Carter on this score and she informs that after almost two decades of serious journalism, her persistent unraveling of the scandals and misdeeds in various high bureaucratic lofts has not resulted in the usual flood of mainstream media attention. Left-leaning media is not interested in this story— and while she marvels at the outright bias she could care less.
“I have a thick skin,” she told me in a recent phone chat. And her passion is “getting to the truth” – wherever that truth may lead. “I don’t let it bother me,” she said of the criticism. And there is a simple reason. “The greatest gift of all” in her work has been that “the American people are part of the discovery” of her investigative findings. An observation made plain by her popularity at CPAC. Carter was a panelist in a discussion “#TrumpedUp: Unmasking the Deep State” – a panel moderated by National Review’s Andy McCarthy (a former federal prosecutor) and including such reporting stars as the Washington Examiner’s Byron York and Chuck Ross of the Daily Caller. She was also featured in the prime time of Hannity, where her reporting has blossomed into public view, making her newly visible as one of the most persistent and serious journalists of the day.
It is abundantly clear why Carter has developed such a considerable following. She is relentless in digging out the facts from her plethora of sources, uncovering documents and delivering repeated stories based on hard cold facts. “None of my stories have to be retracted” she notes, adding that she has made it her mission “to deliver the facts to the American people.”
She is amazed that there are journalists out there who have made it their job to skew the facts. And she is constantly shaking her head at the depth of animosity to President Trump by some journalists, an animosity that all too often seems bordering on the irrational.
“The work is significant” she adds to what she goes about every day. And so it is. The disappointing news is that as Hannity himself has said repeatedly, “journalism is dead” in far too many quarters where once upon a time just getting the facts was the job.
Fortunately, the opposite is true with Sara Carter. She is one determined journalist who is about nothing but the facts. And, as she pointed out to me, none of her stories have had to be retracted.
Sara Carter’s passion for the truth is treating her job as the journalist’s version of that famous line required of witnesses sworn to testify in court. Which would be to get the facts so that the American people will learn “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
And thank God for that.
The views and opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the official position of Sean Hannity or Hannity.com
Jeffrey Lord is a frequent contributor to Hannity.com. You can follow him on Twitter @realJeffreyLord