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ABC 4Corners Trump "story of the century" strikingly similar to work of US bloggers

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From reader and former Detective Sergeant Doubtful John.

This from the left wing Der Spiegel looks to be the script for the ABC Trump expose. Note the virtually identical wording about two Russian agents crossing the US. The ABC effort appears to be straight cut and paste.
 
 
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The Spiegel article reports on 3 online investigators or bloggers.  
 
The 4 Corners transcript shares quite a deal with them!
 

SARAH FERGUSON, PRESENTER: Hello and Welcome to Four Corners.

Tonight, we begin our special 3-part investigation into the story of the century - the election of US President Donald Trump and his ties to Russia.

It starts with a road trip across America in 2014...... two Russian spies were criss-crossing the country, gathering intelligence on the US political system, looking for and finding vulnerabilities.

From Spiegel

Putin's operation to disrupt the presidential election began back in the summer of 2014, when Russia dispatched two spies .....they traveled with cameras from Nevada through California and then back to New York via Illinois and Michigan in their quest for vulnerabilities 

4 Corners wouldn't have had much of a show without the flamboyant Felix Sater.  His name appears 74 times in their transcript.

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Der Spiegel tells us this:

 Jetton, Abramson and Dworkin are....almost like dealers. Without them, people wouldn't know what Trump's lawyers think at night. Without them, pieces would be missing from the Russia puzzle. Without them, the whole affair would also be less entertaining.

Jetton's phone starts vibrating... a reporter from BuzzFeed is looking for contact information for Felix Sater, a former business partner of Trump. Sater is one of the figures often at center stage in this tangled affair. He has known Trump for years and boasts that he arranged a visit to the Kremlin for his daughter Ivanka, during which she was allowed to sit on Vladimir Putin's chair.

"I'll send him a message," Jetton tells the BuzzFeed reporter. Three minutes later, he gets a text message from Sater on his mobile phone. "Felix and I are friends," says Jetton, smiling pleasantly.

Sater slipped into the Russian scandal in the form of an email he sent to Trump lawyer Michael Cohen at the end of 2015. In it, Sater wrote that he wanted to sway the election in Trump's favor with the help of Cohen and Putin.

"I will get all of Putin's team to buy in on this," he wrote.

There it is in the 4 Corners report too.  

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The similarities and sources don't end there.

Nice to know we have a $1BN PA taxpayer funded ABC riding on the coat tails of previously reported salacious stories first published by bloggers in the US.

Their ABC calls the story "Secrets, Spies and Useful Idiots".

Quite. 

As Gerard Henderson might say, can you bear it?

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