Sarah Huckabee Sanders. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
29 October 17
Is Huckabee Sanders becoming bigger bullshitter than Kellyanne Conway?
n the heels of news that special counsel Robert Mueller has filed his first charges connected to the investigation of the Trump campaign for possible collusion with Russia, the White House is desperately trying to shift blame to Hillary Clinton.
On Saturday morning, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee
Sanders tweeted that “[t]he evidence Clinton campaign, DNC & Russia
colluded to influence the election is indisputable.”
There’s just one problem — there is in fact no evidence that the Clinton campaign colluded with foreign agents at all.
Sanders’ tweet about a “Clinton spokesman” refers to a story the Washington Post published Friday
about how Marc Elias, general counsel for Hillary Clinton’s
presidential campaign, “hired a private research firm in the spring of
2016 to investigate Donald Trump.” That firm, named Fusion GPS,
conducted research that culminated in the partially-verified Steele
dossier exploring the Trump campaign’s ties with Russian operatives.
In that story, former Hillary Clinton spokesman Brian
Fallon is quoted as saying, “I am damn glad [Elias] pursued this on
behalf of our campaign and only regret more of this material was not
verified in time for the voters to learn it before the election.”
Sanders would have you believe that Elias’ decision to
hire Fusion GPS — a firm that employed Christopher Steele, a former
British intelligence officer who wrote the dossier — is equivalent with
the Trump campaign’s eagerness to collude with Russian government
operatives in an effort to obtain incriminating information about
Clinton: an effort we learned about in part because of Donald Trump Jr.’s emails.
But the Clinton campaign’s relationship with Fusion
GPS is not equivalent to Trump campaign’s ties with Kremlin-connected
operatives. As Vox details,
there are at least three major differences — the initial funding for
the Steele dossier came from anti-Trump Republicans, opposition research
is not the same as colluding with a foreign government, and some of the
claims in the Steele dossier have since been deemed credible by
top-ranking U.S. intelligence officials operating independently of any
political campaign.
Nonetheless, White House officials and Trump
surrogates outside the administration have relentlessly tried to
distract from the Trump-Russia scandal by ginning up new controversies
around Clinton. During a Fox News interview
conducted just hours before news of Mueller’s charges broke, Sanders
went as far as to say she was “confident” that Mueller would “close” his
investigation soon because “[i]f anyone was colluding with the Russians
to influence the election, look no further than the Clintons and the
DNC.”
On Saturday morning — hours after news of Mueller’s
first charges became public — former Trump campaign manager Corey
Lewandowski took the level of delusion up a notch by pretending that it was in fact Clinton who had won the election, not Trump.
“What we should be focusing on are the continued lies
of the Clinton administration — the continued fallacies that they
perpetuated,” he said.
What Sanders and Lewandowski can’t explain is why
Russian propaganda outlets and Kremlin operatives waged a massive
disinformation campaign on behalf of Trump, if they were indeed
colluding with his opponent.
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