The Sunday afternoon letter from Attorney General Bill Barr on the Mueller report has rocked the political world and burst more than a few bubbles in the liberal media, most notably their years-long insistence that the President and/or his team colluded with Russia.
Some journalists have conceded this reality, while others are mimicking Japanese soldiers still fighting World War II in 1971.
MRC analysts dug into our video archives dating back to 2017 and the official launch of the Trump-Russia probe and found the wildest quotes that failed to stand the test of time. Check out the video for more examples as the quotes below are only a sampling of the individuals who might need a few hugs going forward.
At one point during the probe, Keith Olbermann had an online show thanks to GQ. On August 22, 2017, he bloviated: “The firing of James Comey, an investigation which alone could produce a stack of counts of obstruction of justice that could be fatal to the Trump presidency.”
That same month, disgraced liberal journalist Dan Rather warned on MSNBC that there’s “a political hurricane out there at sea” by the name of “Hurricane Vladimir” that could spell doom for the Trump presidency.
CNN’s Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter still holds Rather in high regard and Stelter was one of the single worst offenders of the false collusion narrative. On his December 16, 2018 show, he lectured: “Does the public understand just how much trouble the President is in. If not, that is a failing of the press.”
During that same show, Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch claimed that “[w]e have dramatic evidence of collusion” in addition to “a motive” so we therefore “have the proof all we need of a scandal that’s arguably worse than Watergate.”
On the December 4, 2017 Hardball, then-USA Today reporter Heidi Przybyla asserted: “We’re seeing that the collusion piece of this, piece by piece, starting to be built out and every week, it seems there’s a new member of the team who knew something about the discussions that were going on with the Russians.”
The media’s eagerness to hype the “collusion” scandal gave a chance for various figures from Watergate to slide back into the spotlight, earning TV gigs while claiming that their experiences decades ago informed what Mueller would do and — spoiler alert — it didn’t help them at all.
One such person was former Nixon official John Dean, who argued on the December 7, 2018 Erin Burnett OutFront after the Roger Stone indictment that “the totality of today’s filing show that the House is going to have little choice the way this is going other than to start impeachment proceedings.”
And of course we’d be remiss if there wasn’t a nod to CNN chief White House correspondent/poet laureate Jim Acosta, who had this exchange with Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on October 30, 2017 (click “expand”):
ACOSTA: Sarah, how can you describe Mr. Papadopoulos as having a limited role when there is a photograph of Mr. Papadopoulos sitting at a table with then-candidate Trump.
SANDERS: The President has thousands of photographs with millions of people, so —
ACOSTA: He was sighted by then-candidate Trump in a meeting with The Washington Post as to who his top foreign policy advisers are. That seems to fight against what you are saying and also, how is it not collusion when George Papadopoulos was in contact with various people who are promising dirt on Hillary Clinton and a series of events that closely mirrors what occurred with the President's own son. He had contacts with Russians —
SANDERS: This individual was on a —
ACOSTA: — in pursuit of information that was damaging about the Clintons. How is all of that not collusion?
Well, it’s not collusion. Even Robert Mueller said so.
