Media laps up scandal that wasn’t
Makes mountain of Russia mole hill, ignores Clintons
Meet the Jan Brady media. Only, instead of “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia” it’s “Russia, Russia, Russia!”
The revelation that Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and then-campaign manager Paul Manafort met with a Russian lawyer to dish dirt on Hillary Clinton is Kremlin crack for liberal media outlets addicted to this story. Add TrumpWorld’s inept attempts to cover up the meeting and its purpose, and the Putin-obsessed press is on an all-time high.
Their actual journalism, alas, is near an all-time low.
This is the story: The Trumpies met with Natalia Veselnitskaya, who allegedly told Trump’s eldest son through a beautypageant connection (hey, this is a Trump story after all) that she had the goods on Hillary Clinton. When they met, Veselnitskaya instead pivoted to her real passion: the Magnitsky Act (which blacklists Russians suspected of human rights abuses) and Russia’s prohibition on American adoptions, adopted as punishment for passage of the 2012 Magnitsky Act.
She offered the Trumpies nothing, and they got nothing.
And that’s the “corruption”? The average Massachusetts pol does more dirty deeds filling out his per diem every month than we’ve gotten from the Trump-Russia “scandal.”
David Graham at The Atlantic writes, “If there was no collusion, it wasn’t for lack of trying.”
He may be right that Trump’s team of shady, thirdrate hacks (Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, former New Hampshireite Corey Lewandowski, and so on) were willing to sell out to Russia for an election win.
But can you arrest someone for prostitution who can’t land a paying customer?
Thus, the Trump story the mainstream media covers more than all other Trump news combined is, as of today, the story of information that wasn’t given in a deal that wasn’t made. This from the same media that all but ignored real stories of American politicians cutting deals with the Russians. People like Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Did you know that, while Hillary was secretary of state, she helped push through a deal to give Putin’s regime control of one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States? And that, around that same time, her family foundation received millions of dollars in donations from Russian-government-backed entities? One of whom paid Bill Clinton $500,000 for a single speech after the uranium deal got the U.S. State Department signoff they needed?
How do I know all this? I read it … in The New York Times.
Ah, but that’s not news worth pursuing. Nor was the fact that around that same time, Hillary’s pal John Podesta was on the board of a Russian-governmentbacked energy company, and he still had an interest in it when he went to work in the Obama White House in 2014.
As for “collusion” in the 2016 election? Well, that phony Russian dossier on Donald Trump’s alleged bad behavior in Moscow was paid for, in part, by Clinton campaign donors, the New York Post has reported. Congressional sources also told the Post that the FBI contracted to pay the agent who authored it $50,000 in taxpayer money (the deal reportedly fell through).
That’s real money and real “collusion,” and nobody cares.
On so many stories of Clinton corruption, liberal media outlets ignored their own facts. Now they want Trump impeached over what, thus far, is a fantasy?
Is it true that the Trumps surrounded themselves with shabby crooks and shady characters? Absolutely. But the shady, shabby characters in the Clinton corruption story were Bill and Hillary themselves, and the press gave them a partisan pass.
This isn’t a defense of Donald Trump. I agree with my friend Sue O’Connell of NECN that Team Trump’s handling of the Russia lawyer meeting is “Dumb & Dumber.” But it does explain how so many Americans can blow off the media’s “Russia, Russia, Russia!” rhetoric.