While journalists obsess over Russia’s involvement in the leaked DNC and John Podesta e-mails, most have been demanding answers exclusively from Donald Trump and his team, instead of the current administration. Underneath it all is the obvious objective to question the legitimacy of Trump’s election win, though the media continually skirt around that admission.
On Twitter Thursday and on Good Morning America Friday, ABC’s Chief Political Analyst Matthew Dowd continued the trend with a series of ridiculous questions on Russia’s involvement in the election.
A question that needs to be answered: what did trump and those around know about Russian hacking and when did they know it?
— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) December 29, 2016
Really the real question Dowd should be asking, if he was a serious journalist: Why didn’t President Obama and his team seem to care about the Russian ‘hacking’ before Donald Trump won the election?
But that wasn’t even the stupidest of questions Dowd asked. He followed up with this false equivalency:
What is more problematic for US national security: few thousand Mexicans coming across the border for work, or Russia hacking our election?
— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) December 29, 2016
The Free Beacon’s Lachlan Markay mocked Dowd’s silly question by posing it differently:
Phrased differently, which is more problematic: a total inability to vet people coming into the country, or reading John Podesta's emails? https://t.co/C5ehhTYO0M
— Lachlan Markay (@lachlan) December 29, 2016
It’s hard to know whether or not Dowd actually believes these are equivalencies or he is just following the mainstream media movement of being intentionally misleading on this issue. Either way, he expressed confusion when conservatives on Twitter tried to explain that hacked e-mails doesn’t equal a rigged election.
Despite getting a mouthful on Twitter for his ridiculously obtuse questions, Dowd was back at it Friday morning on GMA.
Anchor Dan Harris asked him if Obama’s economic sanctions against Russia “go far enough” and if Trump would “roll them back anyway.” Dowd ignored the Obama accountability half of the question, instead worrying over how Trump didn’t take Russia’s “cyberwar” with us seriously:
MATTHEW DOWD: We'll see what he does. I was thinking this morning, Dan, about how we've lost so many stars from the 1980s in the course of 2016 and now we have a President-elect who is burying the foreign policy of Ronald Reagan who called Russia and the Soviet Union an evil empire and he is basically saying we're done with that. It's time to move on. I find it fascinating that Donald Trump said it's time to move on from a cyberwar, an active cyberwar with Russia but he actually can't move on from a bad restaurant review or not winning an Emmy Award for "Apprentice." It is an amazing situation.
First of all, Podesta and the DNC e-mails were leaked over DNC aides and Podesta’s IT ignorantly recommended clicking on a phishing e-mail that requested Podesta change his password, which then gave hackers access to his e-mail. Russia did not “hack” into the system but were given access to it freely, (of course, unknowingly.) For Dowd to call this cyberwarfare is a bit of hyperbole. But what can you expect from the media who has been intent on delegitimizing Trump’s presidency before it even begins?
