{"id":10143,"date":"2023-03-03T22:02:02","date_gmt":"2023-03-03T22:02:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lonecandle.com\/?p=10143"},"modified":"2023-03-03T22:02:02","modified_gmt":"2023-03-03T22:02:02","slug":"the-rise-of-the-trump-russia-revisionists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/?p=10143","title":{"rendered":"The rise of the Trump-Russia revisionists"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\n\n“Does the media\u2019s Trump-Russia coverage hold up? It depends on what coverage you\u2019re talking about. The \u201cTrump as Manchurian candidate\u201d theories<\/a>, the frenzied hunt to unearth any suspicious-sounding \u201ccontacts\u201d with any Russians, and anything based on the Steele dossier<\/a> \u2014 the explosive document that purported to have the goods on Trump but very much didn\u2019t \u2014 have not aged well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the coverage and scandal were about more than that. Though it\u2019s inconvenient for the revisionists\u2019 narrative, the Russian government really did intervene<\/a> in the 2016 election by hacking leading Democrats\u2019 emails and having them leaked. Much of the coverage of the scandal now derided as \u201cRussiagate\u201d was about the investigation into whether anyone associated with Trump was involved in that Russian effort, treating this as an open question to which we simply didn\u2019t yet know the answer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Much of what the critics are arguing here is less about the facts of the scandal and more about the larger narrative around it. Should the media have treated Trump-Russia as the biggest political story in the country? Did the overall amount and tone of the coverage leave a false impression of his guilt? How does it compare to scandal coverage of other politicians, like Hillary Clinton?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And was the media and liberal establishment too suspicious of Trump in treating him like an unprecedented threat to the nation or have his subsequent actions proven they were right all along? The revisionists, in arguing that Trump got a raw deal, want to focus more attention on the overreaching of his liberal and establishment critics, but their one-sided account distorts the full picture of what happened, and reveals their own blind spots about the former president as he runs for office again.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“A fuller recap of what the scandal was all about would go something like this: What became the FBI\u2019s investigation into Trump-Russia was opened in the summer of 2016 for reasons having nothing to do with Steele, Fusion, or Alfa Bank.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That year, leading Democrats had seen their emails and documents stolen in hacks, later to surface on mysterious websites or to be published by WikiLeaks. Initial assessments blamed the Russian government for the hack (and Mueller\u2019s team later confirmed those assessments, fleshing them out<\/a> with much more detail).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trump viewed these leaks as highly beneficial to him, touting them constantly<\/a> on the campaign trail, and even publicly calling on<\/a> \u201cRussia, if you\u2019re listening\u201d to find more Clinton emails. (He then claimed this was a joke, but in private, he urged<\/a> his campaign advisers to try and get ahold of more Clinton emails.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While this was unfolding, the FBI received a tip<\/a> that a little-known Trump foreign policy aide, George Papadopoulos, had been saying he knew Russia had damaging emails related to Clinton before any hack news was public. So the bureau opened a counterintelligence investigation originally focused on a discrete question: Had the Russian government conveyed information about their plans to interfere in the 2016 election to someone on Trump\u2019s team?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was, I would argue, an entirely reasonable question. And with hindsight, due to this investigation and reporting, we know that many shenanigans were indeed afoot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n