What’s a Trump propaganda outlet to do when Dear Leader’s fixer and long-time lawyer, Michael Cohen, is sent to jail for crimes that implicate Trump, too? Why, (falsely) suggest that the Clintons did the same thing.
In a discussion about this Wednesday’s Cohen sentencing, Cohost Harris Faulkner belittled comments by cohost Marie Harf, the lone Democrat on the five-person panel, that the sentencing of Cohen and the upcoming sentencing of Trump's former campaign chair, Paul Manafort, and former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, should be making Trump nervous, especially with the Democrats about to take over the House. “There’s a pattern of lying from the president and his team on all of these issues and we have to get to the bottom of some of them,” Harf said.
“So your speculation (her emphasis) is that you think the president should be worried …. But that has nothing to do with the core case that Bob Mueller put forth,” Faulkner sneered.
At best, that’s misleading. Mueller’s special counsel team has stated that Cohen has been very helpful in the Russia investigation and, while the special counsel’s office has not said exactly what Cohen told them, there are good reasons for Trump to be worried about that. Furthermore, Cohen’s attorney, Lanny Davis, has promised Cohen will spill more beans about Trump once the Mueller investigation is complete.
After falsely suggesting Harf’s analysis was baseless, Faulkner turned to conservative cohost Katie Pavlich. The Clintons have even less to do with the Mueller investigation than the Cohen sentencing. But Faulkner was all ears about that!
Pavlich downplayed the significance of the indictments of Manafort, Flynn and Cohen by saying “They’re all personal crimes.” But she did acknowledge, “It does feel like the sharks are circling.”
Pavlich continued, “From a political perspective, it doesn’t look good to have people who worked on your 2016 campaign – despite the serious double standard between the way Michael Flynn was treated and the way Hillary Clinton was treated, for example, by FBI agents. It still doesn’t look great."
The show’s One Lucky Guy, attorney Tom Dupree (who served in the George W. Bush DOJ), said “There’s no question the president has made some pretty bad hiring decisions in terms of surrounding himself with some of these people.”
Nobody disagreed.
In fact, Melissa Francis said she “wouldn’t give the president the out, though, that he hired a terrible lawyer.”
“I mean, he hired someone as a fixer who was a thug,” Francis continued. But she went on to suggest that that’s just a political necessity - because look at the Clintons!
FRANCIS: Tragically, I think all of these people that we talk about in politics are not great people. I mean, you look at the Clintons, you look at the president … and if you look back at – we just went through George H.W. Bush and we talked about what a great person he was, he was a less effective politician. Maybe because he was a good guy. I think this is all a statement about what it takes to win … The Clinton have fixers, the people that are powerful in politics have them because they’re not great people.
Funny, Francis seems to have forgotten that Barack Obama managed to get through eight years of a presidency being both likeable and effective without any taint. And even the Clinton scandals were nothing compared to the corruption and undermining of U.S. national international interests the way it appears Trump has done.
Watch the Fox News chorus try to mitigate Trump’s mounting troubles above, from the December 12, 2018 Outnumbered.
Crossposted at News Hounds.
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