There’s nothing like a day in which the FBI director reveals that there is an active investigation into connections between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence to send Republicans scuttling for something, anything, to serve as a distraction.
Those Republicans at the hearing concentrated on the idea that the leaker giving Michael Flynn to the news could be some guy named Obama. And in case you didn’t hear that the first time, they mentioned it at least a dozen more times and did their best to get James Comey to sing along. Comey didn’t play that song.
Then Sean Spicer got the task of denying that Donald Trump knew the people on his own campaign. That included Paul Manafort, who was Trump’s campaign chairman, being converted into someone with a “very limited role” in the campaign, security advisor Carter Page turning into a “hanger-on,” and the guy that Trump considered as a running mate, Michael Flynn, being re-labeled as a volunteer.
Three denials in one press conference. Wait! Was that the sound of a cuck crowing?
Back at the hearing, in the spirit of talking about anything but Comey’s kick to Trump’s head, Republicans piled on in attempting to paint Michael Flynn as a saintly “American citizen” caught up in an information release by nefarious Democrats. And they also pitched in to address that little problem with the platform.
Peter King: It can be argued that the Republican platform in 2016 was actually stronger than the Democratic platform on that.
It’s debatable, but it certainly would have been true before Donald Trump got his hands on it and forced a change.
But wait! Fox News to the rescue. It was Hillary’s fault after all!
In their defend-on-every-front attempt, Fox News even ran with an idea that flipped the whole scandal on its head. It wasn’t Russian hackers who worked with the campaign Manafort was managing to hack into DNC servers and release emails, it was the DNC who was after Manafort!
In interviews with multiple sources close to Manafort in Ukraine, Fox News has learned that at least some of what has been reported about Manafort’s dealings in Ukraine has been driven by operatives employed by the Democratic National Committee.
“Sources close to Manafort in Ukraine,” would be the members of the pro-Russian party that Manafort worked to put in power. In other words, “Putin’s people say it was Hillary’s fault, film at 11.”
Actually, that seems entirely as reasonable as every other Republican talking point today.