We can add Rep. Marsha Blackburn to the list of Republicans defending the news that members of the Trump campaign sought directly to collude with Russian government efforts to influence the campaign. Rather than choose one spin for the story, however, Blackburn decided to go for all of them at once.
After Donald Trump Jr. tweeted the email exchange that led to his meeting with a Kremlin-linked lawyer, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) said Republicans have always known Russia is “a bad actor.” She wants to know whether Trump Jr. was tricked into taking the meeting.
Is Trump Jr., now acting head of the Trump Organization, simply a moron? Quite possibly, yes. Is being a moron an excuse for setting up a meeting meant to learn how the Russian government might wish to secretly assist a United States presidential campaign over its rival? What a fascinating question.
She added she’d like to know more about the Clinton Foundation’s links to Russia and former President Barack Obama’s conversations with the country.
That's Rep. Marsha Blackburn, doing her best impression of a 2016 Breitbart comments thread. What high-quality representatives we have these days. We mustn't live in the past by asking who in the Trump campaign knew what and why they hid it, when we could be asking whether the Clinton Foundation something something Obama something.
She also railed against the media for focusing its coverage on the “shiny object of the day” rather than what Congress and the administration is doing to create jobs and provide health care.
The release of emails proving members of the Trump campaign sought to collude with the Russian government, an effort would soon lead to the escalation of Russian-government-sponsored hacking efforts and, indeed, intrusions on the U.S. election infrastructure itself: A shiny object. The more important story, says Marsha Blackburn: using the powers Republicans gained from the Russia-influenced election to pass their ideological agenda.