It has been a totally normal day for the hosts at MSNBC, which has gone harder than any other cable network in promoting the since-debunked theory that the Trump campaign conspired with the Russians to steal the 2016 election.
Hosts Nicole Wallace and Brian Williams cut away from Attorney General William Barr’s congressional testimony Wednesday not once but twice, supposedly to correct the record.
The first interruption came after Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., stated correctly that special counsel Robert Mueller’s two-year investigation into Russian interference in the presidential election found “no collusion. No coordination. No conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government regarding the 2016 election.”
Graham’s remarks came in the larger context of defending the integrity of the Russia investigation, saying Mueller “was allowed to do his job” and still found no collusion. Noted fabulist Brian Williams could not let this accurate statement go uncorrected.
“We’re reluctant to do this. We rarely do, but the chairman of the Judiciary Committee just said that Mueller found there was no collusion,” Williams said. “That is not correct. Nicolle Wallace, the report says collusion is not a thing they considered. It doesn’t exist in federal code.”
This is cute. Are we really going to pretend that “collusion,” which, as the Washington Free Beacon’s David Rutz notes, is not a crime as defined by the federal penal code, was not used for the last two years as a catch-all term to mean illegal coordination between Trump’s people and the Russians?
Wallace added, “What’s stunning is that Lindsey Graham is offering answers to questions that aren’t on the table today. The question on the table today after the reporting last night is why did Barr mischaracterize what was actually in the Mueller report? I’m sorry, Lindsey Graham, but your defensiveness is showing. To talk about everything that went into it and then in the next breath distort it, is a stunning, stunning mischaracterization of what the whole exercise is supposed to be about.”
Williams nodded along, adding in his very sage way, “We try to offer just gavel-to-gavel coverage but that phrase, or the lack of it, its absence from federal code. This ‘no collusion’ mantra is so foundational to why we’re here today that we decided to flag it when we heard him use it yet again.”
MSNBC also displayed an on-air graphic claiming Graham had “falsely” claimed there was “no collusion.”
The Mueller report states specifically that:
Hosts Wallace and Williams interrupted a second time during Barr’s hearing to accuse the attorney general of being a liar.
“So I’m not going to dance around this. He’s lying. He’s lying about what the Mueller report finds around one of the critical flashpoints in the obstruction investigation,” she said.
Sorry the collusion thing did not work out for you. Or are we not using the word “collusion” anymore?
