What Frum does here is a good representation of what the Russian Collusion narrative has always been and continues to be: huge allegations drawn from smoke without any actual evidence of fire.
Before we get to Frum’s points, it’s important to remember what this debate is about. Dems & media insisted that Trump worked w/ our enemies to influence an election.
First, we’ve got Trump’s pre-existing, publicly known business ties to Russia. There are a lot of them.
While we should be conscientious of who the leader of the free world owes, this isn’t, of course, evidence of wrongdoing.
The next two points are also important pieces of context: Russia wanted Clinton to look bad, and Trump’s team knew that.
Again, inferential, but obviously not evidence of Trump having done what has been alleged.
I want to pause here to remind folks what had been alleged. Dems + the corporate press advanced a theory that Trump was a Russian stooge, perhaps had been one since the 80s, and was actively working with them to steal an election.
We’ll come back to this, because it’s important.
Anyway, into the meat of the allegations. We get to the famous 2016 meeting. Much has been drawn from this interaction but as even Frum concludes: “[t]he Trump team did not obtain the dirt they’d hoped for.”
So the hunt for a smoking gun continues.
Next, Wikileaks. Frum provides compelling evidence that Wikileaks advanced a Russian misinfo operation.
If Trump were Wikileaks, this would surely be damning. Alas, Trump is not Wikileaks. So the Trump-specific search continues.
Next, again, we get back to the circumstantial: Trump & co denied Russian involvement in the election.
We’ve got really compelling evidence that Russia did try to influence the election (as has become habit).
But, again, rejecting that consensus isn’t collusion.
Now we get to Manafort. As has been made pretty clear, Manafort gave internal polling data to someone later IDed as a Russian intel asset.
But does this amount to collusion? Mueller (and I would argue common sense) says no. We aren’t given explanation here for why it could be.
Next, my personal favorite: somehow, Trump handling foreign policy differently than Frum would like is evidence of collusion, because Trump didn’t like NATO or Germany but liked Brexit.
Hard to call that a smoking gun.
And, finally, we get to the lying by Trump and others about all of this stuff.
Again, not good! But lying - even to Congress or the FBI or whomever - does not constitute collusion.
Do these stories add up to something? Sure! There’s smoke here. Trump & co did bad things, often out in the open, often tied to Russia.
But do they actually add up to our original claims? No. It doesn’t even come close.
Again: we’ve known this since the Mueller Report.
But because a) that conclusion is inconvenient for those who have pushed this story as the foundational myth of Trump for years and, in fairness, b) there is obviously smoke here, the narrative persists.
But the entire case is just an emotionally laden bait-and-switch.
Frum almost seems to get there himself in this piece. He throws “criminal” out as a qualifier, but this is is again a sleight-of-hand trick.
The press narrative & Dem allegations weren’t that Trump was bad on Russia: it was that he had done something horrible & impeachable.
But Frum’s point about cooperation is *precisely* where his argument is wrong. Mueller never found the causality that Frum implies. That’s the conclusion of the Mueller report!
That cooperation - working together - is exactly what’s been missing.
Can a reasonable person read these inferences & agree w/ Frum about what they think probably happened? Sure. But this narrative has always been advanced as something indisputable because lots of people shared Frum’s belief that surely the worst parts didn’t make it onto the page.
And it’s worth pointing out that, when people criticize “Russian Collusion,” it also includes the many outlandish claims made by media and Dems - the pee tape, Steele, the idea that Trump was a Manchurian candidate installed by Putin.
These were all common allegations.
So when people - myself included - talk about a “Russia hoax,” that’s it.
The media (including Frum) & Dems constructed a narrative to remove a POTUS but, even spending millions of dollars & upending the gov’t, they couldn’t actually substantiate it.
Yet they keep repeating it.
Frum’s contention is that too many media types are helping Trump b/c they are insufficiently aware of how bad Trump is.
But this is the same category of error as the Russia hoax. It begins from a belief - Trump is bad - and works backward to build a case w/ whatever is on hand.
This is the “journalism” of a witch hunt, not an investigation, which had been the beating heart of the Russia hoax all along, and the thing (I think) that offends so many of its present critics across the political spectrum.
It’s certainly what offends me, anyway.
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Biden’s disastrous debate performance brought to a screeching halt a multi-year campaign from the media to present the president as mentally fit.
Do you really remember how hard the press pushed you not to trust your lyin’ eyes on Biden’s decline?
Start here ⤵️
I suspect most of you remember the allegations from the White House that videos showing Biden behaving erratically were “cheap fakes.”
The media rushed to repeat this claim. Look at the extent @nytimes went to say you didn’t see anything and that Biden was fine.
Perhaps the wildest was @washingtonpost, who gave “Four Pinocchio’s” to videos showing Biden displaying cognitive problems, dismissing them as fakes, “pernicious” efforts “to reinforce an existing stereotype.”
Part of their defense was that Biden “doesn’t dance.”
You remember Russian Collusion. But do you remember the “Russian bounties” allegation, where the press ran with a conspiracy theory to make Trump look like a monster?
With the debate tonight, I think it’s timely to revisit a falsehood Biden pushed. Follow along ⤵️
It started with a scoop from @nytimes that claimed Russia had placed bounties on American soldiers in Afghanistan, that Trump knew about it, and he did nothing.
Days later, @washingtonpost followed up with the claim that these bounties—again, allegedly ignored by Trump—led to the deaths of American servicemen.
Do you *really* remember the Hunter Biden laptop story? I fear we’ve lost the plot.
With Hunter’s name in the news I wanted to revisit the extent to which the media went to cover up corruption allegations against—and at the behest of—his father.
Follow along. ⤵️
You have to start with the scoop from @nypost and @EmmaJoNYC.
Their lede from October was damning:
“Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.”
The story was fundamentally about Joe Biden’s alleged corruption. It was huge news, on the eve of an election.
The press leapt to claim the scoop wasn’t legit. And they reframed the issue: now it was about Hunter, not Joe. Here’s @NPR before/after
Good to see the NYT’s considerable resources being put to finding the truth in a debate between private citizens that led one of them to raise a flag upside down.
Real afflict the comfortable, comfort the afflicted stuff here.
It has only become “news” because of the pivot to left wing clickbait that Trump inspired among the press.
It’s politically inspired harassment and not only is it noxious it’s driving a deep animus among its target demo that is fraying what remains of the bounds of our body politic and society more broadly.
I’ve got an oldie-but-a-goodie for you from the archive of unhinged media coverage.
Do you remember how insane the coverage of Trump’s killing of Iranian Gen. Soleimani was?
I bet it’s worse than you remember. Follow along ⤵️
It all started with what I’ve gotta say might be the coldest presidential use of social media in history.
After ordering the strike that killed Iranian General Qaseem Soleimani, Trump tweeted out simply a picture of an American flag.
Many in the media went berserk.
First, the issue was directly with what Trump had done. Outlets claimed that he was rushing America into a war. @washingtonpost tried to point out the hypocrisy of a president who had said he would prevent a war.