Rolling Stone draws false conclusion about Trump, Clinton and Russia
June 1, 2022
Rolling Stone wants us to know that the Russia thing is all over now. In fact, former President Donald Trump’s allegations that the whole thing was a fraudulent setup are now proven wrong. This isn’t exactly so, as we can show pretty easily. But then this has never been something the media has been considering in any unbiased manner, is it? Here’s the Rolling Stone headline:
Trump’s Crusade to Prove the Russia Investigation Was Fraudulent Is Collapsing
What actually happened here is that one of the Hillary Clinton campaign’s lawyers was found not guilty of lying to the FBI. It is good that one of her lawyers was found not guilty of lying. But this isn’t, of course, proof the whole thing either was or was not fraudulent.
Former Attorney General Bill Bar in late 2020 appointed John Durham to investigate whether the Justice Department’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s potential ties to Russia was, as Trump has claimed repeatedly, a fraudulent “witch hunt.” Durham hasn’t turned up much, but he did manage to get former Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussman to stand trial for lying to the FBI. Sussman was acquitted on Tuesday, dealing a massive blow to Durham’s efforts.
Of course, we’ve all forgotten the varied details of who claimed what and when about whom. The general memory is just of Trump and Russia, wasn’t he, umm? And so doing what Rolling Stone is doing here can work. See, we have proof that Trump’s allegations are untrue! So, therefore, the opposite must be true too, for the investigation wasn’t fraudulent, right?
Sadly, that is the sort of level that political logic works at when it hits the pages of the media.
The clear and obvious bias in this comes when we consider this from only a month back:
“Federal election regulators fined Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee earlier this month for not properly disclosing the money they spent on controversial opposition research that led to the infamous Trump-Russia dossier.
“The DNC was fined $105,000 and the Clinton campaign was fined $8,000…”
Oh, why was that?
“The dossier was compiled by retired British spy Christopher Steele. It contained unverified and salacious allegations about Donald Trump, including claims that his campaign colluded with the Kremlin to win the 2016 election. Trump’s campaign had numerous contacts with Russian agents, and embraced Russian help, but no one was ever formally accused of conspiring with Russia.”
Perhaps we should wait a minute here. The Clinton campaign gets fined for the production of the dossier, the dossier that led to the Justice Department investigation, and Rolling Stone says that a lawyer being found not guilty of lying to the FBI shows that Trump’s claims of fraudulence are wrong?
Sure it will work as a tactic because as above, we’ve all forgotten the details of what was claimed. But that is more than a little twisting in pursuit of continuing the narrative, isn’t it? You know, what we might call bias?
Rolling Stone might have fallen a little from those glory days but it still ranks at 12 for arts and entertainment media. Given that audience, there’s a certain playing to the crowd of course. The website itself gains near 24 million visits a month – it’s still a major outlet.
Clinton’s campaign has actually agreed to pay a fine for constructing that Russia dossier in the first place. But because one of that campaign’s lawyers has not been proven to be a liar in court – we agree an achievement to find such a lawyer that this cannot be proven of – therefore the entire dossier was not that construction that Trump has been complaining it was?