On Friday’s Washington Week with The Atlantic, fill-in moderator Franklin Foer unloaded anti-Trump animus from the introduction: "Epstein, Epstein, Epstein, a scandal that even President Trump can't manage or contain." Foer called it a "sordid rabbit hole," but that was about half the show. The words "NO END IN SIGHT" were on screen.
But the subject eventually shifted to the Russian-collusion hoax, and Foer played a clip of Tulsi Gabbard describing the Democrats as engaged in what "can only be described as a years-long coup and a treasonous conspiracy against the American people, our republic, and an attempt to undermine President Trump's administration."
That infuriates Democrats in the media. They didn't seem to understand that the media-political system obsessing over Russiagate from 2017 to 2019 felt like a years-long coup. Susan Glasser of The New Yorker was livid:
FOER: I'm old enough to remember when Russia, Russia, Russia was a hoax, but now it's apparently what they want to talk about all the time. Could you just parse and explain the sleight of hand that she was engaged in?
GLASSER: Well, let's stipulate on the front end that none of this is true, okay? So, I think that's important to state for people. Not only that, but we have the really shocking in any other context image of the director of National Intelligence not only going and spreading lies, she's directly called the former president of the United States, Barack Obama, essentially guilty of treason, referred him to the Justice Department for a criminal prosecution, again, on the basis of a fantasy, a fiction, a lie.
And in that clip that you played, for example, she says, it is the basis of a years-long coup, okay? That is an allegation that`s ongoing, that not only at base, she says that what Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, the former leaders of the intelligence community, all of them implicated, in her view, in basically putting out an intelligence finding that she says wasn`t true, that Russia intervened in the 2016 election on Donald Trump's behalf.
Glasser was passionately angry about a fake video circulated by Trump showing Barack Obama being arrested, and complained about the lack of concern from Republicans in Congress, to the point of getting religion:
GLASSER: Can I just admit that I actually was shocked and horrified even to be living in this news cycle that we were. I actually -- I found that video that Donald Trump circulated on social media of Barack Obama being debased and humiliated in the Oval Office to really make me feel nauseous.
And, again, you know, this is something that all Americans should be condemning. And I think it also speaks to our debasement as a political culture. I went back and I looked. In the first Trump administration, you would get at least the bleeps of concern from Republican members of his party, from people around the country. Not a word, not one word. You know, these are people who've lost their souls. And, you know, ultimately it's for a political power that may or may not last more than, you know, two or four years. And you got to ask, you know, was it really worth it for them?
In her rush to condemn Trump and his supporters, Glasser is skipping past the graveyard of President Obama’s heroic media reputation (as ably explained by my colleague Curtis Houck here and here). Tulsi Gabbard noted accurately that Russia’s goals in 2016 were to destabilize the U.S. electoral process, not to throw the election to Trump.
Yet President Obama and then-CIA Director John Brennan forged ahead, laying the groundwork for the phony accusation of Trump-Russia collusion, Brennan insisted on including the already-dubious (now-discredited) Steele Dossier in the intelligence community’s official assessment, despite its scurrilous claims.
