New revelations about the Obama administration’s investigation into candidate and then President Donald Trump have utterly shattered the idea that Trump colluded with Russia in order to win the 2016 election. In fact, the very intelligence officials leading the probe testified under oath that they had seen no concrete evidence of collusion. These revelations should utterly shame the left-leaning legacy media’s years-long obsession with the collusion narrative.
The New York Post editorial board said “Pulitzer Prizes were won for blaring utter fiction” and Brit Hume, a former White House correspondent with ABC News, called the media’s fawning coverage of the false collusion narrative “the worst journalistic fiasco in my now more than 50-some years in journalism.”
While the Post‘s editorial board claimed former President Barack Obama likely launched the collusion probe into Trump’s campaign and directed the investigation that would hamstring Trump’s presidency, Hume shied away from pointing the finger at Obama in his interview with Fox News’s Martha McCallum on Tuesday. However, he did insist that the media’s breathless coverage about Trump-Russia collusion was a historic disaster, fueled by Trump hatred.
“As for the journalism involved in the pursuit of that story the collusion narrative that we lived with for so very long before it was blown up in the Mueller report, it was the worst journalistic fiasco of my now more than 50-some years in journalism. It was a disaster,” Hume said. “And you look at what the editor of The New York Times Dean Baquet said about it. He said he had set up his whole newsroom, his whole journalistic operation, was to cover that story and it ended up going nowhere.”
“It was a terrible journalistic misjudgment,” Hume added.
Hume argued that this journalistic fiasco was rooted in “their view of Donald Trump that when this charge arose, they thought so little of him, that he was such a terrible person, that it had to be true. The Washington Post and The New York Times pursued it relentlessly, their coverage did not reflect any real doubt that it might not turn out to be true at any time, and then, in the end, it all blew up.”
Sadly, it seems these media outlets did not learn their lesson. Brit Hume also mentioned other news stories that left-wing media skewed due to animus against Trump: the Covington Catholic kids at the March for Life in 2019 and the coverage of the coronavirus epidemic. He charged that many media outlets seem to operate on the belief that “this shutdown should continue endlessly,” likely because Trump has been keen to reopen the economy.
Brit Hume attacked the left-wing media’s collusion narrative in response to new evidence undermining that narrative.
Specifically, the apparent perjury trap set for Michael Flynn revealed the ugly depths to which the Intelligence Community would sink to maintain the collusion narrative. The transcripts of House Intelligence Committee testimony revealed that most of the intelligence actors in the investigation did not have any evidence to suspect collusion. The mostly-unredacted scope memo laying out the reasoning behind appointing Special Counsel Robert Mueller has laid bare the utter baselessness of the case against Trump.
This drew new attention to a January 5, 2017, meeting in which Obama directed Comey and others to “inform him if anything changes in the next few weeks that should affect how we share classified information with the incoming team.” It appears Obama was setting up a “deep state,” pitting top-level intelligence officials against the incoming president they were bound to serve.
Democrats and former Department of Justice (DOJ) and FBI officials seemingly tried to distract from this tsunami of new evidence by condemning Attorney General William Barr’s decision to drop the Flynn case, despite the heinous abuses against Flynn.
Much more remains to be seen, but Hume is right that this mounting evidence is a damning indictment on the left-leaning media’s obsession with the false Trump-Russia narrative.
"It was the worst journalistic fiasco of now my more than 50 some years in journalism.
It was a disaster."@BritHume called the media's coverage of @realDonaldTrump's alleged collusion with Russia the "worst journalistic fiasco" he's seen in his 50-year career. pic.twitter.com/lOOYSgtrDp
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) May 13, 2020
Tyler O’Neil is the author of Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Follow him on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.
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