Greenwald rips CNN's newest hire, fires back at sexism accusation from liberal reporter

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The Washington Post ending their Biden fact-checking database and more round out today's top media headlines

Glenn Greenwald blasted left-wing journalist Julia Ioffe's accusation of sexism Tuesday after he published a lengthy screed against Natasha Bertrand, the new CNN national security reporter known for her credulous reporting on the Russia collusion narrative.

Greenwald, a longtime critic of corporate media and particularly its focus on Russia collusion theories, blasted Bertrand in a Substack post, calling her a "deranged conspiracy theorist and scandal-plagued CIA propagandist."

By hiring her, Greenwald wrote, CNN "added to their stable of former CIA operatives, NSA spies, Pentagon Generals and FBI agents a reporter who has done as much as anyone, if not more so, to advance the scripts of those agencies."

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Ioffe, now with GQ, leapt to Bertrand's defense, tweeting, "Man, Glenn Greenwald seems to have a thing for attacking young, ambitious, successful women. I got it back in 2013, now it's @TaylorLorenz and @NatashaBertrand in his crosshairs. We see you, Glenn."

Greenwald fired back, noting the targets in his piece also included The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg and NBC's Ken Dilanian, who are men. He added he was tired of progressives who "infantalize prominent professional women and then somehow accuse others of being misogynistic."

"Do you see what these powerful and influential elites are doing? They know most people can't withstand being branded as misogynists, racists, etc, so they cynically weaponize those words to shield themselves from critiques and render all critics illegitimate. It deserves scorn," he wrote.

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Fox News contributor Mollie Hemingway called Ioffe's remark "so weak."

"[Greenwald's] critics are showing their struggle to respond to his richly detailed reporting on the regurgitation and hackery from 'Fusion Natasha," she wrote.

Other critics jumped on Ioffe for focusing on Bertrand's gender, rather than responding to the thrust of Greenwald's argument. One documentary maker mocked Ioffe's identity politics by pointing out she had attacked a gay man in Greenwald.

Bertrand came to CNN by way of Politico, The Atlantic, and Business Insider. Along the way, she earned an MSNBC contributor gig, where she frequently reported on the Russia investigation and collusion theories. That included, as the Washington Post's Erik Wemple put it, heaping "credibility on the [Christopher Steele] dossier ... with winks and nods from MSNBC hosts."

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The FBI later concluded the discredited, salacious Steele dossier was full of material on Donald Trump and Russia that either could not be corroborated, was outright false, or simply a regurgitation of public knowledge.

"Those conclusions may well have surprised anyone who relied on Bertrand’s reporting on MSNBC and elsewhere," Wemple wrote last year, adding she was guilty of a "speculative mess" on television. "Incentives on prime-time MSNBC shows point precisely in the direction that Bertrand ventured on too many occasions — that is, toward believing the specifics of a document whose veracity she and others couldn’t begin to assess."

Ioffe was forced to apologize in 2018 after claiming then-President Donald Trump had radicalized "more people than ISIS ever did." She also once claimed she felt less safe as a journalist in the United States than she did in Russia.

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She was fired by Politico in 2016 after sending an obscene tweet about Ivanka Trump.