Today’s paragraphs come to us from Scott Johnson of powerlineblog.com – specifically, Mr. Johnson’s world class takedown of a breathless attempt by the New York Times to make more of the latest Robert Mueller fishing expedition than there is.
As noted earlier today, Mueller has subpoenaed Trump business documents which The Times tells us are “related to Russia”.
But what, exactly, can they have to do with collusion in the 2016 election? Does the fact that Trump never built anything in Russia count here?
Says Mr. Johnson:
Did the real estate deal come to fruition? Apparently not. Even so, they purport to contradict this or at least raise a question of fact about it: “In 2015, a longtime business associate of Mr. Trump’s emailed Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, at his Trump Organization account claiming he had ties to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and said that building a Trump Tower in Moscow would help Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign.” Indeed, “Mr. Trump signed a nonbinding ‘letter of intent’ for the project in 2015 and discussed it three times with Mr. Cohen.”
Only in Timesworld does the latter point about a “nonbinding letter of intent” to build a Trump Tower that was never built contradict the former point about the Trump Organization’s lack of real estate holding in Russia. Beyond the reported fact of the subpoena to the Trump Organization, if it is indeed a fact, every sentence is pumped in to inflate their lack of knowledge into a story.
Scott Johnson wins Paragraphs Of The Day honors for making the New York Times look as ridiculous, small and malevolent as it always seems to be when covering Donald Trump.
Oh, one other thing. During this almost one-year-old witch hunt, Trump and his people have turned over every document asked for by Mueller in a timely manner.
By contrast, during the Ken Starr investigation of Bill Clinton, it dragged on for years because Clinton’s lawyers fought almost every such request as hard as they could – and then dumped massive extraneous material on Starr which he then had to go through, while Clinton told the low information crowd “Look at how many thousand pages of material I gave him. What else can he possibly want?”
When does someone in what passes for our mainstream media these days make note of that difference?
