Thursday is the 75th anniversary of D-Day, which was one of the most consequential military victories in world history. MSNBC, overall, took a break from its daily crusade against the Trump administration in order to honor the men who stormed the beaches of Normandy. Morning Joe, however, just couldn’t help itself.
As NewsBusters contributor Mark Finkelstein noted earlier today, President Trump’s speech in Normandy earned praise from hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, who are normally in the business of trashing the President. Later in the show, they reverted back to the daily dose of outrageous statements.
In a segment featuring former United States Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul and former Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos talking about their recent co-authored report on foreign cyber interference, the panel compared D-Day to Russian interference in the 2016 election without any pushback from the hosts. Stamos said this:
And so in our report we lay out, which is 108 pages, we lay out a number of recommendations for all three of those groups of how they can work together. I'm glad we're talking about this on the anniversary of D-Day. My grandfather was actually there off the coast of Normandy 75 years ago on the U.S.S Borum. And those young men on that ship had all of American society behind them when they were fighting the enemy but we have not been able to motivate American society to fight what is a very real threat against our democracy, which is foreign interference. And so hopefully, we are gonna try to get people to think about -- less about the political recriminations, to stop blaming each other for 2016, and to start to implement some pretty reasonable bipartisan solutions to fix these issues before the next Presidential election.
Ambassador McFaul than proceeded to compare it to Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Just like the last statement, it came with no pushback:
It's a tragic mystery to me, I want to say that first and foremost. And I want to remind everybody that after we were attacked in Pearl Harbor, after we were attacked on September 11th, we had major bipartisan commissions that investigated those attacks and then tried to prepare us for the future. We didn't do that after this attack for partisan political reasons because the President wouldn't acknowledge the attack and he still has a really hard time acknowledging that we were attacked.
The Mueller Report stated without any doubt that Russian intelligence officers interfered in the 2016 elections and there is widespread consensus that it should never happen again. But, even on the anniversary of D-Day, the good folks of Morning Joe just couldnset aside their "can't stop, won't stop" attitude in their animus for the President.
The full transcript is below. Click “expand” to read more.
MSNBC's Morning Joe
06/06/19
8:28 a.m. Eastern
DAVID IGNATIUS: Perhaps I'd begin with Alex Stamos about what you're advocating in your report. Alex, you were the chief security officer of Facebook. Facebook some argue was an important part of how our election process was undermined in 2016. I wonder if you could just speak a little bit about how going forward we can avoid the mistakes that Facebook and the country made last time around.
ALEX STAMOS: Thanks, David. So part of the goal of our report is to point out that there are three major groups in the United States that need to respond to the Russian attacks against our election. There's obviously Facebook and Twitter and the other tech companies, there's the government, and the media overall. And so in our report we lay out, which is 108 pages, we lay out a number of recommendations for all three of those groups of how they can work together. I'm glad we're talking about this on the anniversary of D-Day. My grandfather was actually there off the coast of Normandy 75 years ago on the U.S.S Borum. And those young men on that ship had all of American society behind them when they were fighting the enemy but we have not been able to motivate American society to fight what is a very real threat against our democracy, which is foreign interference. And so hopefully, we are gonna try to get people to think about -- less about the political recriminations, to stop blaming each other for 2016, and to start to implement some pretty reasonable bipartisan solutions to fix these issues before the next Presidential election.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Very good. Mike?
MIKE BARNICLE: And Ambassador McFaul, I would like to follow up on the point that Alex just raised. So once again, we are under attack. The United States of America is under attack by a sworn enemy of our government, President Putin's people, President Putin's government. Why is it that we can't engender more outrage, more commitment to doing something positive about rebutting this attack? It seems we just can't do it.
MICHAEL MCFAUL: It's a tragic mystery to me, I want to say that first and foremost. And I want to remind everybody that after we were attacked in Pearl Harbor, after we were attacked on September 11th, we had major bipartisan commissions that investigated those attacks and then tried to prepare us for the future. We didn't do that after this attack for partisan political reasons because the President wouldn't acknowledge the attack and he still has a really hard time acknowledging that we were attacked. Remember the last time he met with Vladimir Putin, he wouldn't acknowledge it. So what we're trying to do --remember, the Mueller Report was not that kind of investigation. It didn't look at all aspects of the attack. It didn't look at what the Obama Administration did and did not do. It didn't look at what Alex did and did not do, out here in the Silicon Valley. It didn't look at what the media did. And so what we've trying to do with this report is add the recommendations part, right? The prescriptions part that was missing in the Mueller report.
