Tuesday’s Morning Joe was almost completely consumed by coverage of the Mueller investigation. This included lengthy discussions about revelations concerning George Papadopoulos’s reported contacts with Russians while he served as a volunteer policy advisor to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. During one segment discussing these new findings, hosts Joe Scarborough and Willie Geist dishonestly portrayed the Trump campaign as being the only campaign in the history of American politics to work with foreign government sources for opposition research.
After leading off the show by speculating about the implications of the Papadopoulos-related reports, Mika Brzezinski summarized some of the main findings from The Washington Post on him:
The statement of fence [sic] filed in court includes allegations of Papadopoulos making numerous contacts with senior Trump campaign officials about facilitating meetings with Russians and getting encouraging feedback. It said that in April, the overseas professor introduced Papadopoulos to an individual in Moscow with connections to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, MFA for short. The filing lists multiple communications by Papadopoulos in attempts to arrange a meeting between the campaign with the Russian government and alleges that after several weeks of further communications regarding a potential off the record meeting with Russian officials on or about August 15th, 2016, an unnamed official described as “Campaign Supervisor” told Papadopoulos that, quote, “I would encourage you” and another foreign policy adviser to the campaign said: encourage you to “make the trip” to Russia “if it is feasible.” Interesting.
Geist’s immediate reaction to this was pretty unremarkable. He compared Papadopoulos’s conduct to Donald Trump Jr.’s attempt to get “dirt” on Hillary Clinton from Natalia Veselnitskaya during the summer of 2016:
You know, what I'm struck by reading through this plea agreement is the same thing I'm struck by with the Donald Jr. story that we had a couple months ago with the meeting in June of 2016 -- is that when they are presented in the Trump campaign with an opportunity to get dirt from a foreign power about the political opponent, they don't run from it, they're thrilled by it. Don Jr. said: “I love it.” That was his quote when he got that e-mail.
Geist was not satisfied to leave it there, however. In a baffling display of complete Clinton-amnesia, he and Scarborough jointly misled their audience by, in effect, denying the existence of significant reporting detailing Hillary Clinton’s extensive legally and morally questionable connections to the Russian government and foreign intelligence sources:
GEIST: Another campaign might say: I don't want to go anywhere near this; I don’t want to touch this; I know what the implication would be of my having a relationship with a foreign power meddling in this election.
SCARBOROUGH: And, and, by the way, let's just stop just for one second and say every campaign that any of us have ever known about, worked on, reported for, would have all said: get away from me;-
GEIST: [interjecting] Right.
SCARBOROUGH: -get behind me, Satan; I want nothing to do with any of that. The fact that they ran straight to it, Willie, is something that again, in this bizarre political world we live in now, something that we sometimes overlook and is so strange.
GEIST: And it speaks to the tone of the campaign what -- that Papadopoulos went back to his superiors, ran back to his superiors, and said: I’ve got this stuff. And they encouraged him to push forward and go have the meeting. They said: we’re not gonna send Donald Trump to the meeting, but we encourage you to go. So, it’d be one thing if a quote “volunteer” said: oh, I'm excited by this. But then to go to a supervisor who encouraged it and didn't say: woah, cut ties; don’t touch that stuff. It tells you a lot about what was going on in the campaign.
Seriously guys?
The Washington Post just reported last week that Clinton’s campaign and the DNC actively funded opposition research on Trump that used British and Russian intelligence sources. Moreover, just two weeks ago, The Hill uncovered more damning evidence that Russian interests were actively funneling millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation at the same time that Hillary Clinton made a favorable decision for a Russian firm to get “control of more than 20 percent of America’s uranium supply” back when she was Secretary of State under President Obama. As if that wasn’t enough, earlier this year, Politico found that the DNC actively sought out and used Ukrainian government sources for opposition research on Trump.
It’s really hard to give Joe and Willie the benefit of the doubt that they didn’t at least know about the more recent reporting from The Hill and The Washington Post considering that they have covered both stories on the show (albeit quite briefly and dismissively). In fact, roughly fifteen minutes after the aforementioned segment, Morning Joe had another opportunity to talk about these stories. At that point, Brzezinski read out Trump’s tweets from yesterday morning where the President tried to re-direct attention to the underreported Clinton corruption stories. However, instead of saying something remotely intelligent or finally taking the Clinton-Russia collusion issue seriously, Scarborough just laughed at Trump’s comments:
[Joe holds NY Daily News cover of Mueller “Smashing Trumpkins”]
BRZEZINSKI: Shortly before 10:30 yesterday morning, the President revealed-
SCARBOROUGH: [interrupting] I’m gonna keep up rest of the show ‘cause we’re so impressed with this. I’m just keep holding this up [sic]. Go ahead, Mika. Yeah, go ahead.
BRZEZINSKI: -his own thoughts on the indictments, in two tweets.
SCARBOROUGH: My arm’s sore. I’m putting it down.
BRZEZINSKI: Quote: “Sorry, but this is years ago, before Paul Manafort was part of the Trump campaign. But why aren't Crooked Hillary & the Dems the focus?????”
SCARBOROUGH: [hysterical laughing] I’m sorry.
BRZEZINSKI: Oh my gosh.
SCARBOROUGH: I’m sorry. Hey! Who called -- who accidentally called -- hold on, hold, hold on.
BRZEZINSKI: [speaking over Scarborough, still quoting Trump tweets] “....Also, there is NO COLLUSION!”
Here we have just one more example of how when it comes to upholding certain moral and political standards, the liberal media only really cares about applying them to conservatives or anyone else on the right.
Well, it seems that at the very least, one thing the left-wing press is not lacking in is hypocrisy.
