Doug Emhoff is a lawyer, so it matters when he is asked about the allegation in the Daily Mail that he viciously slapped a girlfriend at the Cannes Film Festival in 2012 by calling it a "distraction" and not denying it.
In the last hour of Morning Joe on Friday, they played a preview of a patty-cake interview Joe Scarborough gave to Emhoff in Georgia, and it started off with Emhoff talking like a tough guy about his his wife kicked Trump's ass in their debate.
SCARBOROUGH: You talked about the debate. Why do you think Donald Trump won’t debate her again?
EMHOFF: Well, you saw the first debate, didn’t you?
SCARBOROUGH: Yeah, yeah.
EMHOFF: Yeah. That’s why. He got his ass kicked. And so he’s afraid that that’s going to happen again. Rather he’s spreading this fog, this fog of misinformation and disinformation and gaslighting rather than face her again.
That was the opening for Scarborough to lump in the domestic-violence allegations as part of the fake-news "fog." Scarborough said Trump is spreading “tabloid stories about your personal life, saying -- this should be front and center. He's saying it about your wife and making incredibly crude and lewd suggestions about her past life.”
This is pretty funny stuff after CNN and MSNBC gave porn star Stormy Daniels and her lawyer Michael Avenatti about 200 interviews.
This was then Joe's question, of sorts: “I'm just curious. I know I'm like a very Zen, mindful person [Emhoff smiles at the sarcasm], but I think I'd be pissed off. I'm just wondering... How do you all stay centered? How do you stay disciplined and not really go off and not really push back hard at these things?”
So it’s not asking Emhoff if he battered a woman. Instead, it’s how do you put up with this obvious malarkey?
Emhoff then gave the lawyerly non-denial denial: "We don’t have time to be pissed off. We don't have time to focus on it. It's all a distraction. It's designed to try to get us off our game.” Scarborough nudged: Does it get you off your game?” Emhoff said: “No. All we're doing, all we talk about is this election. We understand the stakes. We understand the responsibility.”
An unnamed representative for Emhoff told the website Semafor "Any suggestion that he would or has ever hit a woman is false," which Emhoff certainly could have said. If he was truly upset by the allegation, he could have angrily denied it.
Apparently, calling it a "distraction" is code to journalists to not ask whether the allegation is true or false, because investigating it helps Trump. This is how the bias-by-omission game is played.
