On Friday evening, Fox News host Eric Bolling rewrote history and theorized that it was Hillary Clinton, not the Trump campaign, who was eager to collude with Russian intelligence.
Bolling alluded to loose links between the political intelligence Fusion GPS and Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who met with Trump campaign officials in June 2016 after she got in contact with Donald Trump Jr. through an intermediary and promised to provide him with “documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.” Fusion GPS once worked on a lawsuit involving Veselnitskaya.
Fusion GPS is also the firm that commissioned the partially unverified Steele dossier that was compiled by a former British intelligence officer and outlined Russia’s alleged effort to cultivate Trump and gather compromising information about him over a number of years.
Put it together, Bolling argued, and the picture that emerges is one where Veselnitskaya was actually an agent of the Clinton campaign.
“Instead of pointing the finger at Donald Trump Jr. and saying maybe he’s colluding — a big word, colluding with the Russians — maybe the Russians were colluding with Hillary Clinton to get information on Donald Trump,” he said.
.@EricBolling: “Maybe the Russians were colluding with @HillaryClinton to get information on @RealDonaldTrump.” #FoxNewsSpecialists pic.twitter.com/UPVangpyO3
— Fox News (@FoxNews) July 14, 2017
Bolling’s conspiracy theory ignores the US intelligence community’s consensus conclusion — one shared by Trump’s hand-picked CIA director — that Russia interfered in the election on behalf of Trump. It ignores the fact prior to joining the Trump campaign, Paul Manafort — Trump’s campaign chairman at the time of the 2016 meeting, which he attended along with Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner — secretly worked on behalf of Putin and reportedly received millions of dollars of illegal payments from Ukraine’s former pro-Russia ruling party. It ignores reports that Kushner wanted to set up a highly unusual secret backchannel with the Kremlin in the weeks following the election.
But amid a bleak news cycle, the theory creates a useful distraction for Trump and his supporters.
Rewriting history
When Fox News wasn’t rewriting history on Friday, hosts tried to frame the Russia story as a nothingburger.
.@jessebwatters: "Everybody wants to talk about Russia, Russia, Russia, but Russia doesn't affect anybody." #TheFive pic.twitter.com/ZoGJlOk1GA
— Fox News (@FoxNews) July 15, 2017
Friday morning’s edition of Trump’s favorite show, Fox & Friends, featured host Steve Doocy claiming, against all evidence, that “the Russia story is starting to fall apart.”
Doocy made that claim while interviewing White House counselor Kellyanne Conway. Despite claiming last December that communications between the Trump campaign and Russia “never happened,” Conway dismissed collusion as an issue on Friday.
“We were promised systemic, hard evidence of systemic sustained furtive collusion that not only interfered with our election process but indeed dictated the electoral outcome,” she said. Hosts failed to remark upon the difference between what she said then and now.
As CNN reported on Friday, the playbook used by pro-Trump media to defend the president and tamp down his scandals is becoming familiar. From CNN:
The pro-Trump media has employed a consistent strategy when responding to damaging reports about the President and his allies, one it will likely continue to use should more revelations concerning Russian interference in the election emerge. Instead of covering those revelations, pro-Trump media outlets often turn to entirely new stories or controversies.
Any factual problems or logical holes — in this case, that it would make little sense for Democrats to have entrapped Trump Jr. before the election only to hold on to the damaging information for almost a year after Election Day — don’t matter so long as these alternative narratives last long enough to confuse audiences during otherwise bad news cycles.
Blame it on Democrats
It’s not just the media — Republican members of Congress have been complicit in creating distractions aimed at letting Trump off the hook.
Trump-supporting Republicans in Congress have repeatedly tried to distract from Trump’s scandals by trying to gin up new ones surrounding Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. On Wednesday, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) went as far as to issue a threat — if Democrats don’t move on from the enlarging scandal surrounding the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Russia, Republicans will have no choice but to further investigate the Clintons.
Republicans have gone to extreme lengths to help Trump. Acting on a request from the White House in February, the chairs of the House and Senate intelligence committees — Devin Nunes (CA) and Richard Burr (NC) — “made calls to news organizations… in attempts to challenge stories about alleged contacts between members of President Trump’s campaign team and Russian intelligence operatives,” the Washington Post reported.
Nunes and Burr’s actions look worse in light of Trump Jr. release of incriminating campaign emails on Tuesday. The emails indicate the Trump campaign was at the very least willing to collude with Russian officials and aware of the Putin regime’s interest in meddling in the election on behalf of behalf of their candidate.
Trump amplifies fake news
Trump, for his part, amplifies distractions and conspiracy theories he perceives as helpful. During a news conference in Paris on Thursday, Trump tried to blame the Obama administration for the fact his eldest son eagerly took a meeting with a Kremlin-connected lawyer who promised to provide the campaign with incriminating information about Clinton.
Like Bolling, Trump expressed skepticism about the intelligence community’s finding that Russia interfered on his behalf. During an interview with Reuters on Wednesday, Trump reasoned that Putin probably wanted Clinton to win because he was worried about Trump beefing up the American military.
“We are the most powerful country in the world and we are getting more and more powerful because I’m a big military person. As an example, if Hillary had won, our military would be decimated,” Trump said. “That’s why I say, why would he want me? Because from day one I wanted a strong military, he doesn’t want to see that.”
Putin has dismissed the election interference story with talking points similar to those used by Trump and his administration — which, despite the enlarging scandal, continues to consider lifting sanctions placed on the Putin regime by the Obama administration.