The Sean Hannity of the Left strikes again.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow accused the Trump administration this week of deliberately altering official White House records to remove a question asked of Russian President Vladimir Putin during last week’s joint press conference in Helsinki. And not just any question, the cable host told her audience Tuesday evening, but one about whether the Russian president wanted Trump to win the 2016 U.S. presidential election!
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Maddow pointed first to the official White House transcript, which fails to include the question posed by Reuters’ Jeff Mason:
Note that the part about whether Putin wanted Trump to win the election is missing from the transcript. What a scandal! But wait, there’s more!
“We can report tonight that the White House video of that exchange has also skillfully cut out that question from the Reuters reporter as if it didn’t happen,” the MSNBC host said.
The Trump administration tried to bury this important moment from the Helsinki press conference entirely, and Maddow caught them!
Not so fast. Like most of the breathless reporting on the Trump administration, this supposed Helsinki scoop is not as scandalous as it’s made out to be. As it turns out, this story is no more complicated than a technical error, according to the Washington Post’s Philip Bump, who noted his paper’s transcript of the press conference also excluded references to the Reuters question.
“[Our transcript] came from Bloomberg Government and ours, too, excluded the first part of the reporters question in which he begins, ‘President Putin, did you want President Trump to win the election,'” he writes. “If you watch the videos, it’s pretty clear. At some point in the middle of that question, there’s a switch between the feed from the reporters and the feed from the translator. In the White House version of the video, you can hear the question being asked very faintly under the woman who is translating saying ‘president.’”
A White House official explained later that their transcript, “did not have [Reuters reporter Jeff] Mason’s audio turned up in time” to capture the specific question.
This is almost as bad as Maddow’s Trump tax return scoop, which landed with a thud loud enough to be heard on both coasts.
“This is not a conspiracy from the White House. While the White House certainly has a track record of misrepresenting facts, this would have been a remarkably futile revision of reality to attempt. As it turns out, they didn’t,” Bump wrote.
The White House has yet to update the official transcript to include the exact question from Mason, but that’s a separate issue from what Maddow claimed. She floated a conspiracy alleging the White House had deliberately scrubbed a question from the official record. This just doesn’t seem to be the case.
In short, another major Trump scoop has fallen apart. Quelle surprise.
[Also read: Rachel Maddow breaks down in tears over report of immigrant babies being separated from parents: WATCH]
