Former Attorney General Bill Barr took his book tour to The Lead with Jake Tapper on CNN on Friday where Tapper, despite acknowledging that Barr’s assessment of the Russian collusion narrative is correct, wondered if Barr was still helping Vladimir Putin.
Tapper began by conceding that Special Counsel Robert Mueller did not bring any collusion-related charges against President Trump or his associates, “One last question which is about Russia-gate, that’s what you call it in the book, which you largely dismiss as a caper and a hoax and -- and a fantasy of Democrats. It’s -- It’s true, I wanted to say, that Mueller found and his team found no prosecutable evidence that there was conspiracy between the Trump team and the Russians.”
Still, Tapper wondered:
If by so blithely dismissing the whole thing as just nonsense, are you not, you're dismissing legitimate Russian interference in the election, which they did, which you don't contest. You admit they did. And a legitimate attempt by the Russians to influence foreign policy through Manafort and others changing the Republican platform, et cetera, and a legitimate attempt by the Russians to make the president more hostile to NATO, more hostile to Ukraine, which they also, through Manafort and others, did. Doesn't that help Putin by just dismissing the whole thing as a hoax? When, yes, winds that the Steele Dossier and the dirty tricks and everything. But certainly, Russia was a pernicious player here.
Barr calmly dismantled Tapper’s poor attempt at logic by pointing out the two have nothing to do with each other:
...yes, the Russians tried to influence our election. They did it mainly through a hack and dump. They grabbed some, hacked into some emails and then dump them into the public. That was the influence. And they tried to affect the election in some way and that was bad, but that doesn't mean that Trump was involved in that and that it’s appropriate to lump him into that to hurt him politically and ultimately try to drive him from office.
Even when CNN comes close to discovery the truth about the collusion narrative, they just can’t help themselves from throwing in the obligatory allegations of critics being Putin’s helpers.
This segment was sponsored by Dove.
Here is a transcript for the March 11 show:
CNN The Lead with Jake Tapper
3/11/2022
4:47 PM ET
JAKE TAPPER: One last question which is about Russia-gate—
BILL BARR: Yeah
TAPPER: -- that’s what you call it in the book, which you largely dismiss as a caper and a hoax and—and-- a fantasy of Democrats. It’s—It’s true, I wanted to say, that Mueller found and his team found no prosecutable evidence that there was conspiracy between the Trump team and the Russians. And I don't want to revisit that.
BARR: Sure, Okay.
TAPPER: But I wonder if by so blithely dismissing the whole thing as just nonsense, are you not, you're dismissing legitimate Russian interference in the election, which they did, which you don't contest. You admit they did. And a legitimate attempt by the Russians to influence foreign policy through Manafort and others changing the Republican platform, et cetera, and a legitimate attempt by the Russians to make the president more hostile to NATO, more hostile to Ukraine, which they also, through Manafort and others, did. Doesn't that help Putin by just dismissing the whole thing as a hoax? When, yes, winds that the Steele Dossier and the dirty tricks and everything. But certainly, Russia was a pernicious player here.
BARR: Well, without necessarily agreeing to your characterizations of Manafort's activities and so forth, yes, the Russians tried to influence our election. They did it mainly through a hack and dump. They grabbed some, hacked into some emails and then dump them into the public. That was the influence. And they tried to affect the election in some way and that was bad, but that doesn't mean that Trump was involved in that and that it’s appropriate to lump him into that to hurt him politically and ultimately try to drive him from office.
