Fact-checking is certainly the right term for any article looking into Donald Trump’s prolonged weekend whine-rant—because it takes a careful, detailed examination to determine if it actually contained any facts. The Washington Post did a rundown of the biggest howlers.
Trump claims he “never said Russia did not meddle in the election” and then repeats a line in which he essentially disputed that by saying that a 400-pound hacker sitting in bed could have been behind the interference. One might argue that undermines his statement ...
Yes. One might. Trump didn’t just deny Russia’s involvement, he did it again, and again, and again. He even did it in the post where he said he didn’t do it. To be thorough, the Post goes through it in detail, showing no less than 18 examples of Trump’s public Russia denial. That includes one from just last month.
Question: Mr. President-elect, you said, just now, that you believe Russia indeed was responsible for the hacking of the DNC and John Podesta’s emails, et cetera.
Trump: All right, but you know what, it could have been others also.
Trump’s rant also included a pair of attacks on Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff (who he accuses, without evidence, of being a “leaker”), multiple shots at the FBI, at his own national security adviser, at President Obama, at Oprah, and, of course, at Hillary Clinton. And he took a slap at CNN, by offering up … a cartoon from someone whose most famous work is of Hillary Clinton in blackface.
Twitter has since suspended the account of the cartoonist … but somehow they let the other racist, name-calling jackass slip by.
Trump’s tweets may take shots at different targets, but they hit the same idea over and over.
Which was said by … nobody. Except Trump, who says it all the time. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, in announcing the indictments, was careful to say that no American had knowingly participated in the charges leveled in the Friday indictments, and that the indictments did not make a judgement about the effect of the actions on the outcome of the election.
But there’s a huge, fundamental difference between saying “these indictments don’t show collusion by Americans” and there being no collusion. The truth is that all the indictments so far delivered cover only a tiny section of the areas under investigation.
The indictments on Friday were all about the Russian use of social media, fake news sites, and targeted ads to denigrate Hillary and praise Trump. Importantly, those practices were also used to stir up anger against blacks and immigrants—which was part of the plan for supporting Trump.
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But the indictments of the 13 Russian people and three Russian entities don’t even touch on the theft of material from the DNC and other Democrats. They don’t get into how that material was disseminated, or outreach to provide the material to the Trump campaign, some of which was highlighted in the indictment against Papadopoulos. They don’t touch on the illegal lobbying and money laundering that featured in the indictments against Gates and Manafort. They don’t touch on the effort to eliminate sanctions at the center of the conversations held by Michael Flynn.
The truth is that all of the indictments we’ve seen so far are only a small slice of the potential pie. The Papadopoulos indictment contains several details about how Russia first offered the stolen material and how that information was shared with the Trump campaign, but it says nothing about how that information was treated, how that relates to the Trump Tower meeting, or whether the distribution of the material through WikiLeaks was a tactic coordinated between the campaign and Russia. Flynn’s indictment is barely more than a stub. We know that he talked to the Russian ambassador about sanctions, but don’t know if that was the first, third, or 30th time such a conversation took place—and we don’t know what Flynn offered to say in exchange for avoiding multiple charges of illegal lobbying, violations of military rules, and even attempted kidnapping. Manafort and Gates show that money laundering and illegal lobbying are on Mueller’s radar—but since everyone from Trump to Kushner to Cohen had a toe in these waters, we don’t know how many more charges are coming in this area.
We don’t know if there was definitive, chargeable conspiracy committed by members of the Trump campaign—but we certainly know there was evidence of collusion.
We don’t know for certain that the outcome of the election was altered by Russian efforts, but we certainly know that they tried, and that they’re happy enough with their efforts, that they’re doubling down for 2018.
Donald Trump keeps repeating that people said there was no collusion and no evidence the election was affected when people did not say that. No one is saying that, except Donald Trump and his surrogates.
The biggest lesson out of the indictments on Friday was just how much information Mueller has that was completely invisible to the public before it emerged, neatly packaged, highly detailed, and fresh from the grand jury. It was the kind of show that should make anyone—anyone—who thought they were going to skate away from this thing untouched because no one could possibly put all the pieces together really, really worry. It’s the kind of thing that might cause a guilty person to … put together a stream of incoherent tweets, pointing the finger in every direction except back at themselves.
And their friends.