NYT has a weird article — right wing propagandist Devlin Barrett is the first byline, with Maggie and Mike contributing as well — purporting to explain the John Bolton investigation. The first and fourth paragraphs claim that the investigation into Bolton is a “a long-running investigation” that “began to pick up momentum during the Biden administration,” claims that conflict with both the NYP’s seeded propaganda story on the search, which described that Kash Patel, “reopened the matter after he took over the FBI in February,” and a well-sourced CNN story, which described that, “the Justice Department reopen[ed] the years-old investigation.”

NYT bases its claim suggesting a continuous investigation on the collection from an adversarial spook service, during the Biden Administration, of emails purportedly sent by Bolton to family members.

The emails in question, according to the people, were sent by Mr. Bolton and included information that appeared to derive from classified documents he had seen while he was national security adviser. Mr. Bolton apparently sent the messages to people close to him who were helping him gather material that he would ultimately use in his 2020 memoir, “The Room Where It Happened.”

But way down in ¶12, NYT describes that John Ratcliffe briefed these emails to Kash Patel and between them they decided that these emails included classified information.

During Mr. Trump’s second term, John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, briefed Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, on the information that had been collected about Mr. Bolton’s emails. The officials believed that the material Mr. Bolton had transcribed into the unclassified and unsecured email contained classified information. Each intelligence agency makes its own determinations about what information is classified, so it is often up to the “originating” agency to decide whether particular pieces of information are classified, and how sensitive they are.

That is, Ratcliffe found something he could use to target Bolton and brought it to Kash. That’s what gave Kash the excuse to reopen the investigation.

This is about where credible DOJ reporters would start ringing alarm bells, because it makes this investigation not like other investigations into classified documents — NYT likens this investigation to the Hillary email investigation, Trump’s own theft of classified documents, and the investigation into Joe Biden — but the John Durham investigation, which Ratcliffe and Kash launched based off emails stolen from Russia which — we now know — were fabricated.

There are even indices in this story that suggest caution. The object of the search, NYT says, was to see whether Bolton possessed anything to corroborate the emails, precisely the approach Durham tried to take with Leonard Benardo.

One major reason for conducting the searches was to see if Mr. Bolton possessed material that matched or corroborated the intelligence agency material, which, if found, would indicate that the emails found in the possession of the foreign spy service were genuine, the people said.

Even according to NYT, the FBI still has no fucking clue whether these emails are genuine (and apparently didn’t take less intrusive means to check, such as a covert warrant to Bolton’s email provider).

Nevertheless, NYT invents explanations for why the material in question didn’t end up in Bolton’s book.

The material in the intercepted emails included information that Mr. Bolton did not ultimately use in his book. That may suggest that he had been told it remained classified during early reviews of his manuscript or that he ultimately decided to omit it, because of either its sensitivity or its importance.

In a story that admits the FBI doesn’t know whether these emails are genuine or not, they don’t consider another explanation: That Bolton may not have written the emails at all, just as Leonard Benardo didn’t write emails reporting on a devious Hillary Clinton plot to make something of Trump’s ties to Russia.

Look, we just learned that Ratcliffe and Patel participated in a 4-year effort to frame Hillary Clinton based off emails fabricated by Russian spies. Can you please not be so horny to normalize all this that you ignore that the fact pattern here is precisely the same?