David Corn, the D.C. bureau chief for left-leaning magazine Mother Jones, is warning of a “right-wing disinformation” campaign to tie Joe Biden to a deep state conspiracy at a time when he has become the clear front-runner to challenge President Trump in 2020.
In a piece published Friday, Corn said a conservative political action committee and right-leaning media are pushing the theory that the former vice president helped instigate a politically motivated scandal to tie Trump to Russia and undermine his legitimacy.
“This certainly is an easy charge to debunk — that is, if you care about facts — but it’s still likely that this unfounded notion will take hold in the fever swamp of Trump-encouraged and Fox-fueled conservative paranoia,” Corn wrote.
Corn said a video from Restoration PAC shows a disingenuous effort to claim British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s unverified dossier on Trump’s ties to Russia was the impetus for the FBI counterintelligence investigation into Trump’s 2016 campaign.
He also called out media outlets, including the Washington Examiner, for giving coverage to someone like former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski for claiming Biden has “gotten a pass” on the Trump-Russia investigation.
Corn indicated that he is concerned that these claims about Biden will spread quickly, possibly with the help of Trump himself.
“Trump and his henchmen have had some success at manufacturing diversions to draw attention from the Trump-Russia scandal and to create fake controversies centered on Deep State machinations and purported spying on Trump,” he wrote. “Now with Biden leading the Democratic pack, they want to draw the former vice president into their dark and sketchy fantasies. And what’s next? The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page? Hannity? QAnon? Congressional hearings? A Trump tweet? This may be a small brush fire at the moment, but the disinformation artists of the right will surely do what they can so that it blazes on.”
The origin of the Trump-Russia investigation, which is now under review by Attorney General William Barr, stems back to July 2016 when an Australian diplomat told the U.S. government that Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos informed him the Russians had damaging information on Trump’s Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
Steele’s unverified dossier has become the subject of GOP concern as it was used by the FBI to obtain warrants to spy on onetime Trump campaign adviser Carter Page starting in October 2016.
Corn is one of the journalists who met with Steele in 2016 to discuss his research. An article of his, published just more than a week before the November presidential election, quoted various allegations made in the dossier and revealed, without using his name, that Steele had provided his dossier to the FBI to investigate.
The dossier was published by BuzzFeed in January 2017.
