Errors, omissions, and bullshit

I'm not sure the bean-counters at the Globe and Mail are getting full value for whatever they pay Mark MacKinnon to traipse around the world digging up his "scoops." Take today's boffo epic, "Searching for Boris," wherein "a curious tip about Trump Tower sends Mark MacKinnon travelling across the globe" to get the low-down on international man of mystery Boris Birshtein.

I've read the entire four page feature several times and there's little of consequence in the story that you can't find on the internet in a matter of minutes, so why does this take months of international sleuthing on Mackinnon's part?

That was his modus operandi a couple of years ago with his scoop about the the graffiti artists who sparked the Syrian civil war. Mark claimed to have spent years tracking down a story that was readily available on the internet the whole time.

Anyway, about half way through today's effort it becomes clear that what we're after is the elusive Trump-Russia link. Maybe Birshtein is the missing link that Mueller's been looking for for the past two years?

As everybody supposedly knows, Trump was forced to cosy up to dodgy Russian financiers because he couldn't find conventional financing for the Trump Tower in Toronto. The only problem with this theory is that Trump hasn't built any Trump Towers in years, and he therefore does not require financing. He just gets paid for the use of the Trump name, which apparently some people are or were willing to pay millions for.

Go figure!

What the Russian emigres behind the Trump Tower in Toronto didn't realize is that the Trump brand was never going to fly in Canada.

Here's a year old story from the Toronto Star spelling out how Trump made millions on the Toronto tower even as it went bankrupt. Incidentally, the Star had numerous stories about mystery man Birshtein as long as fifteen years ago!

Post Soviet Russia was a veritable gold-rush for opportunists of all stripes attracted by the smell of easy money. Birshtein was one of them. So was Bill Browder. Both of them had connections to organized crime networks in Russia and Israel, as well as the intelligence services of various countries.

Elsewhere in the Globe we've got the obligatory good-news story about how the White Helmets we brought to Canada are faring. Ironically enough, there was a hearing about those folks at the UN this month, but you won't hear about it in Canada's newspaper of record. They'll stick to the official narrative; Israel, Canada, and a few other Nations of Virtue heroically saved these heroes from the clutches of the evil Assad.

Anything else is Putinist propaganda.