To Fox News, Robert Mueller’s testimony to the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees was so much about the Clintons!
It’s hard to know which was worse in this Fox News “analysis” of Robert Mueller’s testimony yesterday: Anchor Martha MacCallum’s baseless suggestion that Democrats would not have cared about Russian election interference if Hillary Clinton had won, Ken Starr’s baseless suggestion that the only reason Mueller said his investigation did not exonerate Donald Trump was as “payback” for not sitting for an interview or Starr’s even more ridiculous suggestion that there was no good reason for impeaching Trump, the way there supposedly was with Bill Clinton.
MacCallum began the discussion by suggesting that Democratic concern for Russian interference was only due to partisan politics.
You know, so all the circumstances that we heard about today? All of this that happened during the campaign still would have happened if Hillary Clinton had won. And would we be digging into this investigation in the same way if Hillary Clinton were president and Donald Trump had lost?
I think it's a safe bet that if Hillary Clinton were president, she would never have fired then-FBI Director James Comey, she would have done her best to get to the bottom of Russian interference and she would have taken steps to prevent it from happening again unlike Trump's repeated attempts to obstruct. And we know from the Mueller report that she, unlike Trump, did not accept Russia’s help, nor would she likely signal she wants more help in 2020, as Trump has done. Furthermore, if Clinton won, it would have made the Russian threat less dangerous since the Mueller report made it clear that Russia wanted Trump to win.
Yet nobody challenged MacCallum’s concern trolling. Instead, Starr helped validate it.
Starr went on to say that “no one in his or her right mind” would be calling for impeachment as a result of today’s hearing.
“One, I think, of the huge takeaways” of the hearings, according to Starr, was Mueller’s failure to press Trump to be interviewed in person “and yet at the same time to issue this very questionable, as we discussed earlier, observation about we’re not exonerating him. Perhaps that’s his payback to the president.”
Neither MacCallum nor the other “straight news anchor,” Bret Baier, challenged this baseless speculation, despite Fox’s claim that they “embody the ultimate journalistic integrity and professionalism.”
But wait, there’s more. Starr went on to say that “the politics of impeachment just aren’t working out” for Democrats because the only wrongdoing uncovered is Trump's “ethics, the morality, the greed and these other kinds of considerations.” They “don’t justify launching an impeachment inquiry,” Starr added, because “we are not hearing there is definite proof of crime, as there was during the Clinton investigation.”
On Fox News, lying about an adulterous affair is a much bigger deal than getting in bed with Russians during a presidential campaign and then trying to cover it up - if it's a Democrat doing the lying and a Republican betraying his country.
Watch it below, from Fox News’ July 24 2019 coverage of Robert Mueller’s testimony to the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees.
Published with permission from News Hounds.
