The transcript of this show is here. The content is the usual worthless garbage you get from TV news shows. I recommend avoiding TV news shows like the plague. I ran across this show only because I was researching a quotation taken from it so that I could understand its meaning fully.
As I read the transcript, I noticed how skillfully the reporters were attacking Jared Kushner. Their verbal assassination is thoroughly malicious, but they inject their venom and spread their poison in such ways that they maintain the appearance that they are just reporting facts, exploring the news and doing their jobs. Their “news” taken in the whole is indeed a sham — fake news. They blend facts, truths, allegations, opinions, false conclusions, shaky logic, suspicions and innuendoes.
One trick they use is to say (my paraphrase) “Kushner is innocent, but he’s really not innocent”.
Martha Raddatz says “We’ve seen no evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia during the campaign.” And she says “…[Jared Kushner’s] actions do not prove the election collusion that Trump has repeatedly denied…” That’s saying Kushner is innocent, so far as we now know.
But, but, but there “is a new shadow of suspicion now falling on Trump’s most powerful, closest, and most influential adviser — his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.” Notice how Raddatz ties Trump to Kushner by stating as fact what can only be guesses, namely that he’s the most powerful, the closest and the most influential adviser of Trump.
Suspicion of what? “Kushner is said to have discussed a secret channel to talk to Russia” last December. This is a crime? No, and Raddatz doesn’t say it’s a crime. She slyly plants the idea, however, that he’s really not innocent in context. What context is that? One that she and others have claimed is fact but has never been proven to be fact:
“…pause for a moment to consider the context here. We know from the U.S. intelligence community that Russians meddled in the U.S. election with the goal of weakening Hillary Clinton and propping up Donald Trump. We know that after Trump’s victory, Russia was politically poison, a hostile power accused of undermining the foundations of our democracy.”
“So in that environment, Jared Kushner’s actions were at best highly unusual.”
Most emphatically, we do NOT know from the U.S. intelligence community anything of the sort she claims. We have a pitifully incomplete report from several agencies, a report that has been subjected to severe criticism.
We also do not know that Russia suddenly became political poison or a hostile power after the election. Still less did this supposed revelation mean that Kushner was supposed now to take his marching orders based upon this supposed current of anti-Russian political opinion. The anti-Russia accusations came from people in the swamp that Trump meant to drain. They were coming from anti-Russia contingents in Trump’s opposition. It is senseless for Raddatz to blame Kushner for something “highly unusual”, when he was putting into practice a Trump campaign position.
Raddatz caps her introduction by arguing in so many words that where there is smoke, there is fire:
“…there are three congressional committees, the FBI, and now a special counsel, all intensely looking at every single allegation of impropriety — every one opening up the possibility of new subpoenas and more people interviewed under oath.”
Her comments cast suspicion on Kushner, by her saying basically that he was a bad boy by contacting the Russians when “we know” they’re hostile and meddled in our election. And all these investigations prove that he did wrong, and if we do not have evidence yet, we soon will.
Raddatz returns later with this quote:
“I was struck by the CIA director, former CIA Director Mike Hayden, who made them this week about the Kushner contacts. He said, ‘What manner of ignorance, chaos, hubris, suspicion, contempt would you have to have had to think that doing this with the Russian ambassador was a good or appropriate idea? I know of no other experience like this in our history, certainly within my life experience.'”
Why should we attach any special weight to the opinion of Hayden? He expanded the domestic spying. He supported torture. He argued for reducing the search restrictions in the Fourth Amendment. He was against the Iran agreement. He was a military man and a man in intelligence, not a diplomat. His job was not to increase cooperation with Russia; his positions called for him to regard Russia as an enemy. Raddatz quoted him (“…a Trump critic for a long time…”) but no one with a different or opposing view.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D, California) is an active anti-Trump, anti-Russia voice on the House Intelligence Committee. He’s making lots of political hay out of the trivial issue of election meddling by Russians. He elaborated on the Raddatz “context” scenario and added suspicions of his own.
“But it was the context of an election campaign in which the Russians had been intervening to help Donald Trump, to hurt Hillary Clinton. And, of course, if these reports are accurate, right after that campaign, after that intervention, to have the president’s son-in-law, a key player within the Trump Organization trying to establish a back channel with the Russians through a Russian diplomatic facility, you have to ask, well, who are they hiding the conversations from?”
He presumes, with no evidence whatsoever, that the reason for a back channel is to hide something because there was a quid pro quo:
“And if American policy was going to change for the wrong reason, that is, as a thank you to their intervention in the campaign, obviously that’s very problematic,…” [Emphasis added]
Crimes of the “first-order” by Trump’s associates, arising from payoffs or exchanges of favors with Russians, have not been alleged much less proven. There are no indictments of this category of crimes after 10 months of investigations. There are vague suspicions of hanky-panky that come under the heading of “collusion”.
With enough investigation by enough bodies, what may turn up are “crimes” of the “second-order”, that is, infractions of this or that government regulation or fine print. Maybe someone forgot to report something, or didn’t think it was necessary to report something. Maybe someone made a statement that was false or wrong and is accused of lying. Maybe someone did something that was inappropriate. The more people that are interviewed and pressured, the more such possibilities emerge, because most people do not dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s.
2:17 pm on May 29, 2017
