MS NOW’s Ken Dilanian was caught spreading fake news about FBI Director Kash Patel on live television Wednesday, adding to a long history of peddling propaganda such as the debunked Trump-Russia collusion hoax.
MS Now’s Peter Alexander paused his show Wednesday, announcing FBI Director Kash Patel “landed in Russia for a meeting scheduled to take place there. That’s according to two people familiar with the matter.”
MS Now’s Ken Dilanian joined, telling Alexander, “We don’t know what Kash Patel’s doing in Russia, and that’s one of the things concerning our FBI sources.”
The only problem with this scoop is that it was entirely false. Less than three hours after providing this breaking scoop, Dilanian was back on the network apologizing for the fake news, Mediate reported.
“I want to correct reporting from earlier today. I reported that two sources had told us that FBI director Kash Patel had landed in Russia for a planned trip that had been reported about recently. We’ve since learned that Patel did not, in fact, land in Russia today and remains in the U.S. … The timing of any potential trip remains unclear. Again, we regret this error, and we are transparent about when we make errors. Back to you,” Dilanian said.
Dilanian did not reveal his sources even when it became evident the information was false. As The Federalist’s Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway said on X, Dilanian’s correction raises questions: “So did Ken Dilanian just fabricate his claim that Kash Patel was in Russia? Did he misunderstand a lone source, lie and claim he had 2 sources telling him this? Did someone lie to him?”
Patel was at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. FBI Rapid Response responded to the attempted hoax on X, posting: “MS Now’s ‘sources’ are ‘familiar’ with NOTHING!”
The Federalist inquired with MS Now about Dilanian’s “pattern of spreading false reports” and asked: “Given this pattern, what disciplinary action has MSNOW taken against Dilanian? If none, is any planned?”
MS NOW did not respond to The Federalist at the time of publication.
Dilanian, like many others of the propaganda press, has a record of publishing dubiously sourced claims that hurt Republicans and help Democrats, with corrections coming only after the stories have shaped public debate. When the Hillary Clinton campaign commissioned the Steele dossier, a compilation of salacious rumors about then-candidate Donald Trump, during the 2016 election, the media was a key co-conspirator in what would become the Trump-Russia collusion hoax. Architects of the Russia hoax fed the narrative to their friends in the press, who jumped at the chance to smear Trump despite the dossier’s shoddy sourcing. One instance of this might simply be considered journalistic negligence, but a repeated pattern — as Dilanian and others like him have shown — suggests more than just incompetence.
Dilanian was deeply involved in the Russia hoax. In April 2017 he and Carol Lee published a story about the June 2016 meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort were also reportedly present.
“Two sources tell NBC News that Manafort’s smartphone notes from the meeting included the words ‘donations’ in close proximity to the reference to the Republican National Committee,” the report read. The report used this “evidence” to make the meeting appear more significant to investigators trying to determine if there was any collusion with Russia.
NBC News eventually issued a correction after Sen. Chuck Grassley’s team indicated the word “donation” was not present in the notes, though the outlet held that the “donor” may have been used. But as Lee Smith wrote in these pages, that “difference … nullified the thrust of the story, which was to suggest that Russia was funneling money directly to the Trump campaign.”
Several weeks after the correction Dilanian’s reporting was once again undercut.
Dilanian reported in October of 2017 that Sen. Richard Burr and Sen. Mark Warner had said “they had been able to corroborate some aspects” of the Steele dossier.
But as Smith reported in these pages, “neither Burr nor Warner suggested anything of the sort.” Instead, as Smith reported, Burr said that “the committee cannot really decide the credibility of the dossier without understanding things like who paid for it, who are your sources and subsources?” Dilanian further claimed that his sources “told NBC News the committee has corroborated parts of the dossier.”
Notably, Steele himself later admitted his sources were unverified.
In the lead-up to the 2020 election, U.S. intelligence agencies were aware of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden that contained damaging information about the Bidens, and laid the groundwork for censorship of the story before it even broke. They did so by planting suspicion that the laptop’s damning contents were “disinformation” fabricated by Russia.
For example, former FBI General Counsel James Baker-turned-Twitter deputy general counsel wrote that it “was reasonable to assume” that the contents of the laptop “may have been” hacked and that “caution is warranted.” Notably, the story was throttled across the platform, and users who shared the story had their accounts locked. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted on Joe Rogan’s podcast that the FBI warned the tech giants that there would be a “dump” of “Russian propaganda” like that which purportedly occurred in 2016. Facebook similarly throttled the story.
The day after the New York Post broke the laptop story, Dilanian swooped in with an “exclusive” spreading speculation that the laptop was “linked to a foreign intelligence operation.” The Hunter Biden laptop and its contents were real and not part of a foreign intelligence operation. Instead, Hunter had left his computer at a repair shop, and the FBI confirmed its authenticity. But the Biden administration, Big Tech, and others used these false claims of Russian disinformation — laundered through media toadies like Dilanian — to censor the story in the critical weeks leading up to Election Day.
Dilanian had also tried to gin up hysteria amid the Mar-a-Lago raid, suggesting Trump could have retained “things like names of CIA sources in Moscow or images from the most advanced spy satellites” or the “most protected secrets in the U.S. government.” None of those things were reported to have been recovered.
Dilanian had also previously come under fire after The Intercept reported that Dilanian, while working for the Los Angeles Times, “routinely submitted drafts and detailed summaries of his stories to CIA press handlers prior to publication.” Dilanian would “explicitly promis[e] positive news coverage,” The Intercept reported.
“In at least one instance, the CIA’s reaction appears to have led to significant changes in the story that was eventually published in the Times.”
Delanian’s “journalistic” career is rife with partisan deployments of anonymous sources and speculation about “foreign intelligence” to repeatedly bolster narratives about Republicans that were politically damaging even though they turned out to be completely false.
