The media’s assessment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s July 24 testimony about Russiagate on Capitol Hill changed considerably within 48 hours of its aftermath. News outlets and pundits hostile to President Donald Trump (are there any other kind?) initially described his out-of-touch, uniformed presentation as a disaster. It was a disaster for those beating the impeachment drum, anyway.
Within 48 hours, the echo chamber reversed course, Matt Taibbi points out, instead concluding that their superstar, i.e., as created by the Trump-hating legacy media, “in fact moved the ball forward, his mighty reputation intact.” By the end of those two days, the legacy media news cycle had restored Mueller to his status as “a sacred figure and a superhero.”
The media, which is ignoring China’s attempts to interfere in U.S. elections, is so invested in the Russiagate narrative that it doesn’t seem to be able to give it up.
Taibbi is one of an exclusive club of intellectually honest, yet anti-Trump left-wing journalists. This group also includes Glenn Greenwald, Aaron Mate, Michael Tracey, and Caitlin Johnstone, all of whom concluded early on that the Trump-Russia collusion controversy constituted an establishment/media-driven hoax, if not an unconstitutional coup attempt against a sitting president by the Deep State.
The Media Pursued Russiagate with Religious Fervor
In a superb work of journalism, Matt Taibbi explains how the Trump-loathing media spent years deifying Robert Mueller, whose testimony was a big letdown, whether they admit it or not, to all those suffering Trump derangement syndrome. Plus, Democrats (plus, no doubt, the morally bankrupt Never Trumpers) thought the Special Counsel “could breathe new life” into the impeachment effort because the boring Mueller Report authored by Obama- and Clinton-connected lawyers that found no collusion or obstruction by Team Trump is and has been lefty largely unread.
“This was a monstrous indictment of media. The Special Counsel’s inability to follow questions or remember key details (he was “not familiar” with oppo firm Fusion-GPS!) exploded two years of hype. Mueller was sold in hundreds of articles and TV features as earth’s most competent human, a real-life superhero…. This myth died on television… Hopeful blue-staters across the country for months have indulged in readings of Mueller’s report like it was the word of God…Mueller on the stand was a potted plant. Reporters saw Moses and Jesus. If you need evidence we’re in a religious mania, look no further. This was a pure exercise in restoring an idol for worship…”
Russia Investigation Consumed the Fake News Media
Perhaps the key part of Taibbi’s piece (read it here and draw your own conclusions) is as follows:
“The only people who really care about this story are DC politicians, Twitter, people who don’t have bills to worry about (like Hollywood actors), and the news media, which continues to put this story front and center…The conspiracy tale has validated every Trump criticism about both crooked media and the deep state. The whole narrative is the brainchild of Clinton hacks, a handful of overzealous intelligence nuts, and a subset of the Democratic Party’s weakest elected minds…
“Russiagate isn’t just about bad reporting. It was and is a dangerous political story about rallying the public behind authoritarian maneuvers in an effort to achieve a political outcome. Republicans who battered Mueller with questions weren’t wrong. Investigators in the Russia probe made extravagant use of informants abroad (in the less-regulated counterintelligence context), lied to the FISA court, leaked classified information for political purposes, opened the cookie jar of captured electronic communications on dubious pretexts, and generally blurred the lines between counterintelligence, criminal law enforcement, and private political research in ways that should and will frighten defense lawyers everywhere…This case has seen would-be liberals embracing guilt by association, guilt by nationality, guilt by accusation, entrapment, secret evidence, and other concepts that were considered an anathema to progressives as recently as the War on Terror period. In the name of preventing the ‘sowing of discord,’ they’ve even embraced censorship…”
Russiagate “should be dead,” Taibbi noted but instead, ironically, “it’s gaining new life, with impeachment looking like the New Testament phase of the religion,” among delusional U.S. House Democrats.
Taibbi observed that Democrats running or not running for president in 2020 wasted Trump’s first term “rejecting real-world concerns of voters and throwing political capital into a dead-end conspiracy theory.”
Proven Collusion
The only collusion that’s seemingly been established is that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democrats paid millions for a fake Russian-sourced dossier that the corrupt Obama FBI used as a pretext to spy on the Trump campaign and to otherwise launch this witch hunt. Recall, too, that during the previous administration, Obama and Hillary Clinton approved the sale of 20 percent of U.S. uranium to Russia. And Obama — who ridiculed rival Mitt Romney who warned about Russia — bragged to Putin’s number two that he would have “more flexibility” about missile defense after the 2012 election.
Allegations have also emerged that the Ukrainian government colluded with the Democrats against Trump.
By pushing the Russia collusion hoax for approximately three years, the mainstream (or fakestream/lamestream) media colluded with the Democrats in an attempt to sabotage the Trump administration.
Like Trump or not, there is lots of speculation that the Special Counsel’s office, under absentee landlord Robert Mueller — who came across in his House testimony as a mere figurehead in the Trump-Russia investigation — held his report until after the 2018 midterm elections to help the Democrats take over the U.S. House.
The Swamp Gets Bogged Down
Added: Pro-Trump historian Victor Davis Hanson explains how — despite punditry expectations about Mueller’s prosecutor dream team — the non-Ivy League Trump lawyers prevailed over what turned out to the worst and the dullest in the Special Counsel’s office:
“Almost all the all-stars were not just liberal but ‘correct’ as well. Many were either Clinton donors; a few in the past had defended either Clinton aides or the Clinton foundation. Many also had been tagged as Department of Justice future superstars. Their tony degrees seemed designed to spell the doom of the buffoon Trump…In fact, aside from age, looks, and degrees, the outnumbered Trump team was far more experienced than their counterparts, and it was sensitive to the fact that the legal agendas of the Mueller special counsel investigation were little more than pure politics, media hype, leaks, and had little to do with finding out with whom, if any, the Russians had been working to warp an election and sandbag a presidential campaign.
“Had the special counsel team been less biased, its lawyers might have discovered within days that the only interventionist foreign national who was actively recruiting Russians as nefarious sources was Christopher Steele, a Clinton operative paid through the firewalls of the DNC, Fusion GPS, and the Perkins Coie law firm to compile a tabloid dossier on Trump, to leak it to old friends and new contacts in the DOJ, FBI, and CIA and thereby to sanctify and disseminate his dirt to the media and tar the Trump campaign—and later an elected president’s transition and administration.
“Whereas the Trump team sought to defend their client from charges they knew were false, the Mueller team sought to destroy Trump first, and worry about the evidence later. That proved an enormous disadvantage from the outset. One side saw it as a legal matter of proving an absence of guilt, the other as a political effort to fuel impeachment…From the outset Trump’s team was convinced that their client neither had colluded with Russia nor had obstructed an investigation of a crime that did not take place. He had turned over almost everything the all-stars wanted, and freely allowed the White House staff to testify. From the beginning of the investigations, his lawyers sensed that the Mueller team quickly had concluded there was no crime, but there might be lots of innuendo, rumor, gossip, and Trump antics to be had that could be jammed into their final report and thus provide fodder for impeachment hearings…
“Snobbery and unmerited elitism characterized the entire collusion hoax and Mueller boondoggle. But being progressive, woke, and highly credentialed is not synonymous either with intelligence or wisdom…”
Hanson also asserted that things changed when Bill Barr — who launched a DOJ probe to the origins of the Russiagate investigation — replaced Jeff Sessions as U.S. attorney general.
“[Barr] sensed from the start that Mueller’s team, far from being all-stars, were nothing but rank partisans uninterested in the commission of felonies by an array of Obama officials—deceiving a FISA court, leaking classified memos, lying under oath to congressional committees, and inserting informants into political campaign. Instead, they were obsessed with perjury traps, nutty things like the ossified Logan Act and the Emoluments Clause, and hounding a minor cast of transitory Trump aides…The last three years have been a painful relearning of that most obvious but forgotten truth that it is what we do rather than who we say we are that truly matters. That the lesson was lost on self-described egalitarians and social justice warriors is the most ironic lesson of all…”
