(1) ANATOMY OF AN INFO OP. You’re a Democrat career civil servant somewhere, and you hate the president, who’s a Republican. You want to undermine him, and also advance your own political and ideological goals. How do you do it?
(2) You write a report that dovetails with your ideological thinking, but one that has no support from your bosses, the administration, or even reality. It doesn’t even have to be coherent or factually sound.
(3) When it’s laughed out of the room, you leak it to the media–as you’d always planned to do. The media runs the initial story like, “see, even Trump’s own DHS doesn’t think Antifa and far-left terrorism is a priority, or even a problem!”
(4) Then, once the DHS report is scrutinized inside government and subsequently rejected–guess what? Media has another story: “Truthful report censored by Trump!”
(5) When a legit report comes out–say, about Antifa and its documented anti-American activity and violence–the media casts it as “politicized.”
(6) The people who do this are loathsome. They know exactly what they’re doing, and that it’s an effort to undermine. The media knows it, too– they’ve got the whole story arc of these pieces already planned out before the first one runs.