On Tuesday, MSNBC’s Morning Joe panelists turned the spin up to eleven following the House Intelligence Committee’s vote to release Devin Nunes’s classified memo to the public. The memo, which is currently awaiting review by the President, allegedly details abuses of FISA surveillance protocols by high-ranking Justice Department officials.
Evidently deeply concerned about the memo’s implications for national security, Joe Scarborough reminded viewers that the Department of Justice had warned releasing such classified information would be “incredibly reckless.”
Scarborough then shifted his criticism to the claims contained within the memo itself, endeavoring to discredit it ahead of its release. This would prove to be a difficult task considering none of the show’s panelists, nor anyone else at MSNBC, have actually seen it.
Interestingly, Scarborough’s lack of specific knowledge did not preclude him from asserting, “We know what’s in the memo.”
“The only thing that seems to be going on is they’re presenting half-facts,” he continued. Within the first ten minutes of the three-hour show, he had slammed the memo as “a half-truth,” “a whole lie,” “false,” “misleading,” “twisted,” “distorted,” and more.
The certainty and intensity with which Scarborough criticized the document – without ever having seen it – raises questions about his objectivity, especially considering the resemblance between his statements and Democrats’ own talking points. A cynical viewer might dare speculate that the hostile media reaction to this memo suggests it contains information that they would prefer to keep quiet.
