Sorry, Donald. Not ‘fake news’
It’s official.
What our president called a “hoax” wasn’t a hoax, and what he claimed was “fake news” wasn’t fake.
Read it and weep, Mr. President. It’s all verified in the Mueller report, which, by the way, does not “exonerate” you, at all.
While Trump looks to skate, thanks to a federal policy that prohibits charging sitting presidents, Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his investigators clearly didn’t intend to let his lies and behavior go unchallenged.
The probe verified at least 140 contacts between Donald Trump and 18 of his associates with Russian nationals, WikiLeaks or their intermediaries during the 2016 campaign and presidential transition, according to a count by The New York Times.
All but about 30 of those contacts were previously known, largely thanks to herculean journalistic efforts by the media groups like The Times, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, CNN, Slate, Politico, Mother Jones, major television networks and others. Those reports, now verified by the Mueller team, were routinely labeled falsely by Trump and his associates as “fake news.”
It is now more clear than ever that the only fake news was and is what comes out of Trump’s mouth and Twitter account, along with the robust and insidious Russian social media “information warfare” machine that Mueller confirmed “by early 2016 favored candidate Trump and disparaged candidate [Hillary] Clinton.”
The Times, in tallying Mueller’s listings of the Trump gang’s Russian contacts, accounted the bulk of them as follows: 13 to the president, 25 to Trump’s lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen (you’ll recall he’s going to jail for lying to Congress about one of them), 17 to Donald Trump Jr., 16 to campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, 7 to campaign manager Paul Manafort, 5 to former national security adviser Michael Flynn, 6 to son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, 18 to associate and self-described political dirty-trickster Roger Stone. And, yes, they all denied at some point or another any contact or help or deals with Russians.
Trump, of course, hasn’t stopped being Trump. He spent Good Friday tweeting more fake news, calling the “Crazy Mueller Report” a waste of money and “fabricated & totally untrue.”
And of course, he issued a threat. “It is now finally time to turn the tables and bring justice to some very sick and dangerous people who have committed very serious crimes, perhaps even Spying or Treason.”
What about the disappearing ink?
Those probe tallies didn’t count the magically disappearing contacts.
In his report, Mueller repeatedly lamented what he couldn’t find because encrypted communications made key conversations invisible.
“The Office learned that some of the individuals we interviewed or whose conduct we investigated – including some associated with the Trump Campaign – deleted relevant communications or communicated during the relevant period using applications that feature encryption or that do not provide for long-term retention of data or communications records,” Mueller wrote in his executive summary.
Think WhatsApp and other corruption-encouraging tools of the future.
And there were the text messages of former Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon and campaign associate Erik Prince.
They were deleted. Wait, wasn’t that what Trump asked the Russians to find? Oh, no, that was Hillary Clinton’s so-called “deleted” emails.
Meanwhile in America
So what’s the mood of America now that the Mueller report is out and marking the end of the beginning?
Predictably, the Democrats are in a tailspin about how to proceed. Many, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, and a 2020 presidential candidate, want the House of Representatives to begin impeachment proceedings. Others aren’t so sure that wouldn’t bite Democrats in the 2020 campaign. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, pledged “rigorous congressional oversight.” The House already has asked for an unredacted version of the report.
Republicans, too, are all over the place. Some, like our Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, breathed a sign of relief and suggested we all “move beyond” it. Sen. Mitt Romney, of Utah, condemned the “dishonesty” of Trump and his associates – conduct he said was laid bare in the report.
“I am sickened at the extent and pervasiveness of dishonesty and misdirection by individuals in the highest office of the land, including the President,” Romney said in a statement. And he fumed at those in the Trump campaign who welcomed help from Russia.
Romney, a former presidential candidate, wrote in 2017 in a Washington Post op-ed that he would challenge Trump when he felt the president overstepped. But he hasn’t. Until now. “Reading the report is a sobering revelation,” he said, “of how far we have strayed from the aspirations and principles of the founders.”
News outlets find much the same out in RealPeopleLand. Some people think the probe was a waste of time. Others want to see people from the administration in handcuffs. But most, it seems, just want to know when they’ll get a raise, when grocery prices will go down and whether they will have health care next week.
Who can blame them?