Because the u. S. Government ethics rules are not Strong Enough to allow him to stand up to what this president and his family are doing. So he is leaving his job at the office of government ethics in order to try to strengthen those rules from the outside. Very interesting resignation today. More on that ahead. Theres a lot going on. We have a big show tonight. We are going to start with Something Different tonight. I said at the end of last nights show that weve got a little bit of a scoop to share with you tonight. This is that scalp. Inhouse on our staff we have been talking about this as an inside kind of an insideout story. Okay. Here it goes. We have this thing. We have been doing it on our show for a while now. Its called www. Send it to rachel. Com. Basically the idea is that if you want to get in touch with us, if you want to give us a tip or send us a document, can you do so via that website. Www. Send it to rachel. Com. We get tons of stuff that way. We get information about local political fights. We get a lot of information about bat behavior by elected officials. We occasionally get news about really Good Behavior by elected officials. We get anonymous tips, and we get documents too. We get a lot of documents. Weve had a lot of firsthand records come across the transome through www. Send it to rachel. Com. Documents that show us how the government is making decisions, what the government is doing, whether or not they are talking about it publicly yet. Its been a great resource for our reporting. I will say it one more time. Www. Send it to rachel. Com. Its still up and running. A few weeks ago we got a new document through that channel, and at first glance it was just unbelievably red hot. If by any chance this document is real, it is so sensitive, so classified that i cannot show it to you. I cannot show it to almost anyone because of its purported classification level. Its hard to circulate it at all or even to describe it to people. I dont say that to try to hype it. I say that to let you know its logistically difficult to validate Something Like this. When its classified at that level or appears to be classified at that level, you cant run the document like that by people the way you would for any other kind of document we might get shipped to us from some source. People who are in a position to recognize or authenticate this document, people who have worked with things at this level of classification, they typically will refuse to even look at a document like this if theres any chance that it is real, that it is real classified information that has been improperly disclosed. Thats because the terms of their own security clearance mean effectively that they cant review Something Like this without it creating legal obligations on them. Its very hard to check this stuff out. Classificationwise, it is logistically very difficult to deal with. Very, very sensitive. In terms of the political implications of this document that we are given, its content, politically this thing is so sensitive, it takes all the air out of the room and all of the nearby rooms as well. People talk about finding the smoking gun. What got sent to us was a smoking gun. It was a gun still firing proverbial bullets. Heres the deal. We believe now that the real story we have stumbled upon here is that somebody out there is shopping carefully forged documents to try to discredit News Agencies reporting on the russian attack on our election. Specifically on the possibility that the Trump Campaign coordinated with the russians in moubting that attack. Let me show you what i mean. Heres what we know. Do you remember a month ago when a relatively new News Organization called the intercept published this report. Top secret nsa report details russian hacking effort days before 2016 election. This was published by the intercept almost exactly a month ago. Monday, june 5th. The intercept has a bunch of very good reporters working there. A lot of Aggressive National security reporters who really earned their stripes. In terms of the russia story, the intercepts have theyve really stood out for being basically aggressively skeptical on that story. Skeptical that there was a russian attack on our election. Skeptical of the possibility that the Trump Campaign might ha have colluded in that russian attack. There is nothing wrong with a News Organization have an editorial take. Im not criticizing them for their take on russia. For the purposes of understanding what we just figured out, its important to understand that the intercept does as a News Organization have a take on the russia attack, on the russia story. Their take on it is that theyre dismissive of the story. Thats why it was really spriesing and really interesting that it was the intercept of all places that published this big advance in the russia story. New details on the russian hacking effort into the u. S. President ial election, including a u. S. Intelligence report, which said that the attack went on for longer than had been previously disclosed. It was wider than previously disclosed. They got further this their attack than had been previously disclosed. Quoting from the intercept. Russian military intelligence and sent spear phishing emails to more than 100 local Election Officials just days before last novembers president ial election. Russian government hackers were part of a team with a Cyber Espionage mandate specifically directed at u. S. And foreign elections. They focused on parts of the u. S. Election system russian hacking may have penetrated further into u. S. Voting systems than was previously understood. Russian hacking may have breached at least some elements of the u. S. Voting system. All this explosive stuff is cited to a highly classified Intelligence Report obtained by the intercept. In addition to their writeup of it, this is important, the intercept didnt just publish an article about that top secret Intelligence Report. They actually published the top secret Intelligence Report. They published the p top secret nsa report they said they obtained. Five pages of it. Detailing this american intelligence understanding of how wiggle their way into the election system. It came with a flow chart of how the russians go the in and why they targeted the places they did. It is detailed. The whole thing was labelled top secret on every page. The intercept reported when they published this thing that u. S. Intelligence officials wouldnt comment on the document, but they said agencies did ask them for certain redactions. Some of which the intercept agreed to make. They made those redactions specific redactions at the request of u. S. Agencies, and then they hit publish on that story. New detailed evidence into american intelligence gathering on russian attempts to get inside our election system. This was a very big story based, again, on a very classified document. Huge story. Real scoop. Now even just a month later that intercept story is remembered less, i think, for the content of the story, and more for what happened immediately after they published it. Because immediately after they published it, we learned that there was an arrest. We got our first heads up about that intercept story just before 4 00 p. M. On june 5th. An hour later at 5 00 p. M. Sharp, june 5th, the Justice Department announced they had already had in custody, already arrested the person who allegedly leaked that top secret document to the intercept. This is a pending federal case now against that nsa contractor. Its not resolved at all. The nsa can tell how many people have ever looked at an individual secret document like this. They can tell who they are by name. They have this list of a half dozen people who they know have accessed this document. They go down that list looking for someone who has access to the document who also appears to have been in touch with this News Organization. She was the only one of the six who had both access to the document and been in touch with the intercept. Then they go down a second line of approach. The agent says in this criminal complaint that theres a crease like you get a crease from folding something. Theres a crease that is visually evident on the document itself that was a clue to the fbi that whoever took this document off the nsa had printed it. Had printed the page and folded it and carried it out of the nsa office by hand. And then there was another clue. This is where the story gets a little crazy. Most color printers, maybe even all of them, i dont know, they apparently leave behind when they print, right when they print out a piece of paper from a computer, right . When they print, they leave behind a fingerprint on every sheet that they print out. You know how in old school detective stories they do forensic analysis of the quirks of individual typewriters to find out which typewriter typed the ransom note or whatever. There is a version of that for computer printers too. That may have come acalling when the intercept showed the nsa this document they had obtained through a source because they wanted the nsa to validate it, to comment on whether or not this document they had received was real. In that document, which we have access to because they published it online when they published their story, in that document along side all the plainly visibility texts and the flow chart and even the redactions and everything, along side all that obvious stuff was also this barely visible fingerprint from the printer it was printed on. The fingerprint is basically a series of light almost invisible yellow printed dots. Unless you were looking for them, you would never notice them by reading the document. If you run the page through like an Image Software and do a little magic reversing the colors, and in this case a little brightening so you can see them on your tv, up pops if you are looking for it a readable specific grid of these little dots. It tells you the model number, tells you the serial number, and it tells you exactly which time and date that printing happened. Now, it may be that the fbi didnt have to uses those little yellow printer dots to track down their suspect. The fbi doesnt mention their printing dots in their charging documents, but once the intercept published this document online, for people who understand forensic tracking of documents and the dangers of leaking documents, those little yellow dots were an obvious thing to worry about because they were there on that document that the intercept published. They were there to be read by a trained observer on that document that the intercept published online. Now let me show you how this worked for us. Now watch. Im going to show you that same pattern of dots except this time its from a different document. Okay . As you can see, its the same pattern of dots. The top half of the pattern. What im showing you here, this is not the document published by the intercept. This is from the document that somebody sent us through www. Send it to rachel. Com. That same pattern of dots, the upper portion of it its not all of the dotsz. Just the ones that slipped through in a cut and paste job. This is what it appears to be to us. A cut and paste forgery using the intercepts nsa document as a template. Again, here, see that thin line there on the upper lefthand corner . You can see what i think is the crease where the fbi says the intercept document was folded after it was printed. We think we see remnants of that exact same crease on the forged supposed top secret nsa document that got sent to us. Heres another thing i can show you. Look at the metadata here. Check this out in terms of timing. The suspect in the intercept leak goes to jail on saturday. Gets arrested on saturday june 3rd. Saturday, june 3rd, the fbi interviews and arrests reality winner, this nsa contractor. She has not she has been in jail since saturday, june 3rd. The intercept published they are story around 4 00 p. M. Monday, june 5th. The foshlged document that we got sent to us appears to have been created in that narrow window of time between those two events. After reality winner got arrested and before the intercept published the document with its identifiable printer dots and the crease in the paper that appear to have been lifted off that same document that the intercept published. They were working from a document that was not yet publicly available. They would have started creating that file or they would have started that file after reality winners arrest and before the intercept published it to everyone. Then sent it to us two days later. From what we can see from the metadata, we believe this is the timeline. Now, is the timeline a clue as to who contacted us and sent us this document . We dont know. Maybe the metadata itself has been faked or is wrong in some way. I dont know. The big red flag for us is that the document we were given this is part of what made it seem so red hot it names an american citizen. The document we were sent, which we believe to be a forgery, names a specific person in the Trump Campaign as working with the russians on their hacking attack on the election last year, and the specific name of the Trump Campaign person is irrelevant. I am not sharing it now because we believe from how the nsa works from multiple conversations with current and former officials familiar with documents of this type, we believe a u. S. Citizens name would never appear in a document like this. Even if the typos and the weird spacing and the other odd stuff had snuck through for some reason, an american citizens name would not have snuck through. Not at this level of an nsa report. Tham our document contains an american name spelled out, that says to experienced people who have worked with this stuff that what we got is forged. Its fake. Thats interesting if you work on this show. This is news because why is someone shopping a forged document of this kind to News Organizations covering the trump russia affair . Last week three journalists resigned from their jobs at cnn after that network retracted a story they had written about the Trump Administration related to the trump russia affair. Cnn says the sourcing of that story in retrospect did not meet its editorial standards. Also last week, vice retracted two stories about the Trump Administration, like cnn. Vice also cited problems with the sourcing of those stories. The thing thats not knocking around in the back of your mind right now is from 2004 when the legendary dan rather lost his career over a story in the evening news that delved into president bushs the rather team had documents that they got from a source that they checked out, but the sourcing of those documents was later attacked and undermined. Cbs was ripped to shreds over the process it went through that resulted in those documents being put on the air as the basis for that story. Still over a decade later, the origin of those documents is murky, but undeniably cbs running that story was a disaster for two things. It was a disaster for everyone involved, and it was a disaster for a news story. That was, in personal terms, the end of a trusted voice of reason and insight and perspective, dan rather, as a regular presence in the Family Living room. In terms of the news, that was a spike through the heart of the story of george w. Bushs National Guard service keeping him out vietnam, which was a true and interesting story, and which really might have been an ongoing political liability for candidate george w. Bush. Nobody was ever willing to touch it again during that campaign because of the way those documents purporting to prove out the worst aspects of that story blew up like a pipe bomb at cbs news. And so heads up, everybody. This is what i mean by an insideout scoop. Somebody for some reason appears to be shopping a fairly convincing fake nsa document that purports to directly implicate somebody from the Trump Campaign and working with the russians on their attack on the election. It is a forgery. Let me cavat that. It is either a forgery, or every single National Security official we consulted about that story is wrong about it. I dont know if the Trump Campaign worked with russia or not. If they did knowingly work with a foreign government, a Foreign MilitaryIntelligence Service to attack our election, to help trump to the presidency, that is clearly the biggest political scandal in modern american history. By a mile. We dont know if it happened or not though. We dont know yet whether it happened or not. Not yet. The special counsel is investigating. Kpgal committees are more or less investigating. The American News media is investigating. Whether or not the Trump Campaign did it one way to stab in the heart aggressive american reporting on that subject is to lay traps for american journalists who are reporting on it. Trick News Organizations into reporting what appears to be evidence of what happened, and then after the fact blow that reporting up. You then hurt the credibility of that News Organization. You also cast a shadow over any similar reporting in the future. Whether or not its true. Right . Even if its true. You plant a permanent question. A permanent astericks. A permanent who knows as to whether that too might be false like that other story. Whether that too might be based on faked evidence. Heads up, everybody. Part of the defense against this trump russia story now, we can report, includes somebody apparently forging at least one classified nsa report and shopping it to News Organizations as if its real. We dont know who is doing it, but were working on it. Heads up, in the meantime time, everybo