Do you remember when emails were published making Hillary Clinton’s campaign look bad and the Democratic National Committee look biased against Bernie Sanders, and the Democratic establishment reacted by insisting that the only story here was the hacking that exposed the email?
The jawboning forced the media to earnestly defend reporting on their contents. In short, the logic went as such: Their hack and release was unquestionably illegal and wrong, but the information itself, once it was out there, deserved to be reported on as truth.
Republicans are now adopting the arguments of the DNC circa 2016, claiming that the whistleblower alleging damaging claims against President Trump’s dealings with Ukraine is a corrupt actor who gamed a rigged rules change and that this conspiracy renders the actual contents of his complaint as illegitimate.
Said conspiracy theory is questionable at best. The notion that rules about whistleblower complaints were changed to abet the Ukraine complaint has already been debunked. Furthermore, the whistleblower may or may not be partisan, but unlike the thoroughly discredited Steele dossier, the whistleblower complaint been largely corroborated by the president himself.
Further investigation is required to vet the rest of the report, but that Trump used his office to request that a foreign government investigate his domestic political adversary during a conversation, in which the president also bragged about our aid to said government, has already been confirmed by the White House.
Stipulate for a moment that the whistleblower acted maliciously when he leaked the details of the Ukraine call. How does that change how we react to the contents of the call, which Trump himself has confirmed?
It doesn’t. Republicans who pretend otherwise are playing the same dumb distraction game Democrats did in 2016.
