Trump's lawyers were "getting ready" to make a proposal to Mueller about an interview—after Trump freely offered one A YEAR AGO—in the same way Trump was "thinking about" asking Comey to investigate the dossier.
Some bad, over-credulous reporting tonight. cnn.com/2018/04/12/pol…
Some bad, over-credulous reporting tonight. cnn.com/2018/04/12/pol…
2/ Tonight's bad reporting matters because it gives Trump and his team a *fantastically* wonderful gift: it allows them to claim they were *going* to offer a voluntary interview with Mueller *but for* Mueller's bad faith. The truth? They've been playing games on this for a year.
3/ Media watchdogs have told media for a year now to STOP reporting Trump and his team's claims regarding their motivations or thinking as FACT—on the basis of Team Trump having failed to establish the basic source credibility journalism requires. The watchdogs have been ignored.
4/ I suspect I speak for many professors who teach journalism when I say that right now is a terrifically hard time to be teaching journalism—as our nation's most talented journalists are sacrificing proper sourcing or framing for the sake of access. Trump has *all* the leverage.
5/ Trump and his lawyers dithered and lied to the press, public and Mueller for a year about their readiness to cooperate with the probe—and the *very next day* after Mueller does something that truly endangers Trump, his whole team shouts, "Bad faith! And we were about to deal!"
6/ How do I know that what Trump and his criminal defense attorneys did was just slick lawyering? Because I was a criminal defense attorney for years. How do I know U.S. journalists failed Journalism 101 in how they handled the story? Because I teach journalism to undergraduates.
7/ This has been a great day for Trump because—besides getting the media to credulously act as stenographers for his false claims of a (now gone) readiness to deal with Mueller—media also erroneously reported that Comey's book says Trump asked the FBI to investigate the Dossier.
8/ Trump's dithering and deceit with Comey on whether he was "asking" the FBI to investigate the Dossier or "thinking about asking"—and *quite* willing to be talked out of it!—looks *remarkably* like the very dithering and deceit we saw today on the topic of a Mueller interview.
9/ The reason for this is that Trump has an identifiable criminal persona that defense attorneys readily recognize—and whose peculiarities and peccadilloes are readily predictable. What Trump did in private with Comey is cut from the same cloth as what he did today with US media.
