by Clarice Feldman
Despite the oceans of pixels, buckets of ink, and hours of TV and radio coverage respecting the Mueller report, there are two important things underplayed or ignored: the ubiquitous nature of Russian interference from 2014 on, which Obama ignored, and the real target of the witch hunt — General Michael Flynn (and why). To get there, let’s first quickly review the pre- and post- report major media coverage.
The Ridiculous Press Propagation of the Hoax and Response to the Report
There are countless examples of the media beclowning itself when the left’s dream of a slam-dunk against the president failed. It was like the election night follies all over again.
To quote the satirical Babylon Bee: “CNN: ‘God Allowed the Mueller Report to Test Our Unshakable Faith in Collusion’”
Here are some examples.
CNN’s Jake Tapper indicated it was suspicious that Attorney General William Barr repeated several times that the report found no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. This after his network touted the notion of collusion hundreds of times over the past two years. As my friend Harry Lewis noted, this repetition was “not only fair, but essential to driving home [the hostile media’s] malice, stupidity, and folly. Barr did that with great economy.”
At the Barr presser on the report, CBS’s Paula Reid suggested that the attorney general’s summary was too generous to the president. In particular, she questioned his characterization of the Mueller investigation as “unprecedented”. Barr who is clearly no lightweight responded,
“Is there a precedent for it?”
“Well, no,” conceded Reid.
“Okay so unprecedented is an accurate description, isn’t it.”
”Yeah,” admitted Reid.
It’s hard to pick a favorite, but disgraced NBC anchor Brian Williams is certainly a top contender, comparing Barr to Iraq’s former propaganda minister Baghdad Bob. (You might recall Williams was nabbed making up stories about Hurricane Katrina.)
While most of the media blathered on, caught flatfooted in pushing for years the Clinton fable, not all were suckered in.
Terry Moran of ABC tweeted:
John Brennan has a lot to answer for — going before the American public for months, cloaked with CIA authority and openly suggesting he’s got secret info, and repeatedly turning in performances like this.
Glenn Greenwald, no fan of the president, produced what I consider the most detailed, fair response to the Mueller report:
In sum, Democrats and their supporters had the exact prosecutor they all agreed was the embodiment of competence and integrity in Robert Mueller. He assembled a team of prosecutors and investigators that countless media accounts heralded as the most aggressive and adept in the nation. They had subpoena power, the vast surveillance apparatus of the U.S. government at their disposal, a demonstrated willingness to imprison anyone who lied to them, and unlimited time and resources to dig up everything they could.
The result of all of that was that not a single American — whether with the Trump campaign or otherwise — was charged or indicted on the core question of whether there was any conspiracy or coordination with Russia over the election. No Americans were charged or even accused of being controlled by or working at the behest of the Russian government. None of the key White House aides at the center of the controversy who testified for hours and hours – including Donald Trump, Jr. or Jared Kushner — were charged with any crimes of any kind, not even perjury, obstruction of justice or lying to Congress.
These facts are fatal to the conspiracy theorists who have drowned U.S. discourse for almost three years with a dangerous and distracting fixation on a fictitious espionage thriller involved unhinged claims of sexual and financial blackmail, nefarious infiltration of the U.S. Government by familiar foreign villains, and election cheating that empowered an illegitimate President. They got the exact prosecutor and investigation that they wanted, yet he could not establish that any of this happened and, in many cases, established that it did not.
As he noted, here are some of the press accounts obliterated by the report:
- Paul Manafort never visited Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy; Guardian reporting otherwise is utterly fake.
- Buzzfeed’s claim that the President told Michael Cohen to lie about negotiations to build a Trump Tower is Moscow — FAKE.
- CNN’s claim that Cohen asserted that then-candidate Trump knew in advance about the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting (bruited by Carl Bernstein, Jim Sciutto and Marshall Cohen) — FAKE.
- Rachel Maddow’s charge that “the Russians may be controlling our government” — FAKE.
- Claims by Marcy Wheeler (repeated by others, including the Washington Post) that the post-election contacts between Trump and Russia were evidence of a conspiracy — FAKE.
Also FAKE: the Steele Dossier, pee-pee tape stories, secret meetings in Prague, and corrupt financial dealings with Russia going back years before the election.
Claims about the Trump Tower meeting in 2016 fell flat — there was nothing criminal about it.
In Greenwald’s words:
One can debate whether it’s unethical for a presidential campaign to have dirt about its opponent released by a foreign government, though anyone who wants to argue that has to reconcile that with the fact that the DNC had a contractor working with the Ukrainian government to help Hillary Clinton win by feeding them dirt on Trump and Manafort, as well as a paid operative named Christopher Steele (remember him?) working with Russian officials to get dirt on Trump.
In sum, neither during the investigation nor at its conclusion did most of the American press cover itself with glory. Neither did the Democratic Party and the intelligence community. They deserve our scorn for deluding Americans for years, and I predict they will get it. People who are scammed may be loath to acknowledge they were, but they will. Reality bites.
As for Part 2 of the report on obstruction, . . .
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