If reporters were honest with themselves, they would tell you that the chip on their shoulder has nothing to do with President Trump’s 2016 campaign being willing to take incriminating information on Hillary Clinton from Russians. Their gripe is that Trump is encroaching on their own turf.
For two years, the national media have feigned shock that Trump’s son, Don Jr., and his son in law, Jared Kushner, agreed to meet in 2016 with Russians who had promised to provide the campaign with information that would “incriminate” Clinton as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”
The fake outrage renewed Wednesday night after Trump said in an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that he saw no problem with the meeting at Trump Tower and that he would be fine with his 2020 reelection campaign meeting with anyone who claimed to have opposition research on a political opponent.
“Should he have gone to the FBI when he got that email,” asked Stephanopoulos, referring to Don Jr.’s initial correspondence with Russian Rob Goldstone.
“OK let’s put yourself in a position,” Trump said. “You’re a congressman. Somebody comes up and says ‘Hey, I have information on your opponent.’ Do you call the FBI?”
There was no reason for Stephanopoulos to have had to imagine himself as a congressman. He’s a already a journalist and there isn’t a single one of those in the national press who wouldn’t have agreed to take the same meeting that Don Jr. and Kushner attended at Trump Tower in 2016. And if there is, they need to find a new line of work.
John Avlon, CNN’s anchorman impersonator, said, “What Donald Trump did was the Founding Fathers’ worst nightmare.” Kevin Collier, a reporter at CNN, called Trump’s new admission “an invitation for countries to give Trump dirt on a Dem opponent.” On MSNBC, anchor Stephanie Ruhle asked why House Democrats now wouldn’t “move forward with impeachment proceedings.”
Democrats likewise got in on the hot new action. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont said the House “should immediately begin impeachment inquiries.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts tweeted that “A foreign government attacked our 2016 elections to support Trump, Trump welcomed that help, and Trump obstructed the investigation. Now, he said he’d do it all over again. It’s time to impeach Donald Trump.”
Et cetera, et cetera.
Democrats are politically motivated to pretend that they’ve always been skeptical of Russia — they weren’t as recently as 2012 — but though the media hate Trump for the same reasons Democrats do, they’re mostly in a piss about this because Trump is stepping on their beat.
It’s reporters who are supposed to be the ones with access to scandalous information, often by way of seedy sources, not politicians.
In the interview with Stephanopoulos, Trump correctly referred to the never-materialized dirty info on Clinton as potential “oppo research.” Every campaign puts this together. Some campaigns, like Clinton’s 2016 operation, actually pay foreign people to put it together! That’s precisely what Christopher Steele’s notorious Trump dossier was — opposition research put together by a British spy with Russian sources.
Until Trump, the way it worked in presidential politics was that the campaigns would build portfolios with negative information on their opponents and then feed that information to journalists. The purpose is to keep every candidate’s hands clean and for reporters to break the news and become stars.
Reporters will openly admit that this is how it works. CNN’s Rebecca Buck, said in 2015, when she was with RealClearPolitics, that “Every journalist I know is being pitched opposition research from both sides — some useful, some not.” She said that “the best reporters take such information under consideration, like they would any tip, but then confirm and report out the story on their own.”
Trump works around that whole process by getting the information and using it himself because he doesn’t care if his hands are clean. During the 2016 campaign, his response to the now-famous “Access Hollywood” tape wasn’t to ask journalists about possibly interviewing Juanita Broaddrick, Kathy Shelton, and Kathleen Wiley, who have all accused former President Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct. His response was to bring them in person to a presidential debate and give them seats in the front row.
The meeting by Trump’s son and son-in-law is now being cleverly lumped in with the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta emails to create some atmosphere of criminality that implicates Trump. But these things having nothing to do with each other. The Trump Tower meeting was supposedly intended to render still unknown information that would “incriminate” Clinton. It’s still unknown because nothing was ever shared. This is all an effort to compensate for the fact that the special counsel never found a conspiracy between Trump’s campaign and Russia.
Trump allowed in his interview with Stephanopoulos that if he did receive information that he felt should be turned over to the FBI, he would do it. But in this case, there was never a crime, nothing inappropriate, and in fact no useful information shared — not that the sharing of information would have even necessarily constituted anything illegal in and of itself.
This is not about Russia’s election interference. It’s about reporters believing they should have been at the Trump Tower meeting.
