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Top 10 things the media got wrong about ‘collusion’ and ‘obstruction’
By Sohrab Ahmari
April 19, 2019 | 10:01pm | Updated
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WaPo columnist’s overstated, undying Ukraine narrative
“The Trump campaign worked behind the scenes” ahead of the Republican National Convention “to make sure the new Republican platform won’t call for giving weapons to Ukraine to fight Russian and rebel forces.” So reported The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin. Soon the story — of craven Trump campaign officials beholden to Moscow and determined to backstab Kiev — took on a life of its own. But it was false. As Mueller’s report notes, the change to an amendment to the GOP platform wasn’t “undertaken at the behest of candidate Trump or Russia.” (Side note: Trump authorized arms sales to Ukraine, something his predecessor refused to do.)
Josh Rogin’s July 2016 Washington Post story overstated the Trump campaign’s involvement in changing the GOP platform on Ukraine. One campaign official, without higher approval, pushed for the scope of assistance to be expanded beyond current (Barack Obama-level) assistance.
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The Atlantic accuses Jeff Sessions!
In June 2017, the combustible young reporter Julia Ioffe wrote an article for The Atlantic, running to several thousand words, that cast doubt on former Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ claim that he didn’t meet with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak as a Trump surrogate but rather as a matter of routine in his role at the time as a US senator. The Sessions-Kislyak meeting, Ioffe suggested, amounted to yet more shady Russian influence on the Trump camp. Chalk Ioffe’s reportorial credibility as another casualty of the Mueller report, which noted that the meeting in question didn’t “include any more than a passing mention of the presidential campaign.”
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David Corn’s dossier debacle
It was the document that set off the whole shebang. In October 2016, days before the election, David Corn of Mother Jones wrote of an unnamed “former senior intelligence officer for a Western country,” Christopher Steele (unnamed at the time), who claimed that the Russians had dirt on Trump they could use to blackmail him. Thus were born the infamous “Steele dossier” and endless late-night jokes about a Trump “pee-pee” tape. But the Mueller report barely touches on the dossier — and confirms none of its outlandish claims.
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McClatchy catches Michael Cohen in Prague
Speaking of the dossier, remember when McClatchy’s Greg Gordon and Peter Stone reported that Mueller had evidence that Trump consigliere Michael Cohen had “secretly made a late-summer trip to Prague during the 2016 presidential campaign,” supposedly to meet his dastardly Russian handlers? If this one easily verifiable claim could be verified, the McClatchy reporters said (and perhaps secretly hoped), so could the rest of the dossier! Here’s Mueller’s report on that matter: “Cohen had never traveled to Prague.” What’s Czech for “egg on your face”?
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Buzzfeed knows who told Cohen to lie
Which brings us to the top foul-up of the whole sordid saga. That would be BuzzFeed’s report, by Jason Lepold and Anthony Cormier, in January claiming that Trump had directed Cohen to lie to Congress about talks to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Well, here’s the Mueller report on that count: “The president did not direct [Cohen] to provide false testimony. Cohen also said he did not tell the president about his planned testimony.” Ouch.
So surely BuzzFeed has now offered a straightforward correction and apology, right? Think again. Instead, Editor in Chief Ben Smith published a convoluted self-defense, only begrudgingly admitting that “Mueller has the last word.”
https://nypost.com/2019/04/19/top-10-things-the-media-got-wrong-about-collusion-and-obstruction/