Scandals that the press largely refused to cover or take seriously had little impact on the 2020 presidential election, according to a new Politico report.
Funny how that works!
“How ‘Obamagate’ and Hunter’s ‘laptop from hell’ fizzled,” reads the report’s headline. Its subhead reads, “The Logan Act. Burisma. Tony Bobulinski. John Brennan. Unmasking. The Durham probe. They were all on Trump’s last-ditch Bingo card, flummoxing voters.”
The opening paragraphs state, “In the end, ‘the biggest political scandal in the history of our country’ and ‘the second biggest political scandal in our history’ turned out to be neither.”
It adds, “President Donald Trump’s eleventh-hour efforts to impart a stain of criminality onto President-elect Joe Biden through a series of vague, circuitous and often false allegations, did little but inflame his committed supporters. And the months-long investigations by his Republican allies in the Senate failed to gain traction outside of the Trumpworld echo chamber as Trump hurtled toward an Election Day defeat.”
Well, a couple of things here require a response.
First, “scandal” status is not determined by whether the public cares. For example, it is a legitimate scandal that presumptive President-elect Joe Biden lied about being arrested in Johannesburg for supposedly trying to visit an imprisoned Nelson Mandela. That only a few people seem to know anything about this story does not make it any less of a scandal.
And in terms of real scandals, “Obamagate,” where the Obama administration’s FBI submitted inaccurate, incomplete, unsupported, and even intentionally falsified information to justify its surveillance of the 2016 Trump campaign, is certainly a serious one. Just because members of the press have sided with the intelligence community against the Trump administration does not mean the spying abuses are not genuine and serious. The same goes for the Hunter Biden laptop story, which alleges the 2020 Democratic nominee leveraged his position in the federal government to enrich his family. This could likewise prove to be a major outrage. Just because reporters refuse to cover it, and just because it appears not to have registered with the broader public, does not mean it is no big deal.
And speaking of media downplaying scandals, this entire “fizzled” report by Politico is a bit rich considering how certain Politico reporters have handled “Obamagate” and the laptop story.
In October 2019, for example, Politico’s Natasha Bertrand and Daniel Lippman sought to defend former CIA director John Brennan after he was accused of being involved somehow in the 2016 spying scandal.
White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley noted correctly that Brennan, who has defended the spying abuses, is not an especially trustworthy source considering he perjured himself before Congress. Amazingly, Bertrand and Lippman asserted in their since-amended report that “Brennan has not been accused of lying to Congress.” He absolutely lied to Congress.
Earlier, in June of that year, Bertrand also said of the so-called Steele dossier, which is almost certainly Russian disinformation, that “nothing” contained in the document that the FBI used to justify spying on the Trump campaign “has been disproven.”
Later, after Hunter Biden’s laptop become a niche topic in the 2020 presidential election, Bertrand (again!) authored an entire report titled, “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”
Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe claims the laptop and its contents, including potentially damning emails, are “not part of some Russian disinformation campaign.” The Justice Department and the FBI, which is in possession of the laptop, concur with Ratcliffe’s assessment.
The Politico “fizzled” report is not wrong when it says President Trump’s focus on the laptop and the spying scandal likely did him no favors on Election Day. The Politico report is also correct when it describes both stories as extremely convoluted and niche.
It is just that it is a bit annoying to see a publication that has done its fair share to downplay both stories as non-scandals claim now that they “fizzled,” as if the press’s handling of both scandals is unconnected somehow from public perception.
