If the media are defining “collusion” as President Trump’s team being willing to accept potentially beneficial information from Russia in the 2016 election, all future cable news analysis on the issue should include a disclaimer: Hillary Clinton’s campaign did precisely the same thing and more!
There is no real consensus about what any collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia would have entailed (which is helpful for Democrats and self-interest-driven Republicans like Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., in maintaining a scandalous fog over the White House) but news reports typically discuss it with ominous references to campaign advisers and aides who had any form of contact with Russian officials.
We know that the president’s eldest son Donald Trump Jr., son-in-law Jared Kushner, and former campaign manager Paul Manafort met in summer 2016 with a Russian lawyer who said she had information that Kremlin-connected individuals were funding the Democratic National Committee. NBC reported Wednesday that the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that Trump Jr. asked her at the meeting if she had “evidence of illegal donations to the Clinton Foundation.”
Here’s how Ned Price, who donated $5,000 to Clinton’s campaign but nonetheless is paid by NBC to front as an analyst, digested that news on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”:
Throughout the campaign we saw something that could be termed “collusion in plain sight,” whether it was Donald Trump during the summer asking Russia to release those emails or Donald Trump in the final month of the campaign alone referring to Wikileaks some 163 times, commanding his followers to go check out all of the pilfered — the documents that the Russian’s had pilfered from John Podesta, the DNC and other sources. So, this is not at all surprising that Donald Trump Jr. was asking Natalia Veselnitskaya about dirt on the Clinton Foundation. This was a campaign team that was eager to get any sort of dirt, any sort of ammunition regardless of the source, including if it came from the Russian government.
It’s not “collusion in plain sight” for Trump to have sarcastically called on Russia to release the emails Clinton deleted (and that federal investigators wanted). If it is, what is it called when a sitting U.S. president tells his Russian counterpart that he’ll have “flexibility” to discuss missile defense after his re-election, as Barack Obama did in 2012? (Actually, the New York Times described that incident as a “private moment of political candor,” so I guess that’s that!)
It’s not “collusion in plain sight” for Trump to have talked at his campaign rallies about the hacked emails Wikileaks published on such an obscure platform called “the Internet.” In fact, it’s a good thing he told voters where to find the emails, otherwise they might have missed that they were also referenced in reports in every major newspaper.
But the dumbest part of Price’s analysis is the bit about the Trump campaign having been so “eager to get any sort of dirt, any sort of ammunition regardless of the source, including if it came from the Russian government.”
When a campaign is “eager to get any sort of dirt” on its opponent, that is otherwise known as “opposition research.”
And in this case, wherein the campaign would take “any sort of ammunition … including if it came from Russia,” Clinton’s team is guilty of the same offense and then some.
Clinton’s campaign circulated the so-called “Trump dossier,” which is largely based on claims by paid anonymous Russian government officials, to journalists during the general election.
Byron York reported in November that Christopher Steele, the former British spy who compiled the dossier, “personally briefed reporters from the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, the New Yorker, and Yahoo” on its contents.
Together, the collection of documents purport to demonstrate that Trump is compromised by the Kremlin and vulnerable to blackmail.
The only difference between what Clinton’s campaign did and what Trump’s tried to do is that Clinton’s did it through a lawyer, who then went through the scuzzy Fusion GPS research firm.
Trump’s campaign went directly to a Russian, who apparently provided nothing.
Clinton’s campaign paid a lawyer, a former spy, and Russian officials to gather a dossier that claimed, among other things, that Trump had prostitutes urinate on his hotel bed while he stayed in Russia. It’s almost like the Clinton team was involved in some scheme or conspiracy or — what’s the word I’m looking for? (Collusion.)
It’s supposed to be a scandal that Trump Jr. asked the Russian if she knew anything about the Clinton Foundation.
It’s not, but if NBC is going to pay its analysts to say it is, everyone should know that Clinton’s campaign did much worse.
