In the Free Press, Eli Lake writes that though he didn’t deserve President Donald Trump’s insult, the recently deceased Robert Mueller tarnished his legacy by failing to debunk the phony “Russia Collusion” scandal.
“A phony scandal, Eli?” MS Now host Joe Scarborough tweeted. “The US Senate’s Intelligence Committee concluded the 2016 campaign created a ‘grave counterintelligence threat’ that made Trump’s campaign susceptible to ‘malign Russian influence.’ The Committee’s Chairman? Marco Rubio.”
The thing is, Morning Joe didn’t spend years panicmongering over “susceptibility” of some low-level 2016 Trump campaign staffers falling under Putin’s influence. No, his audience experienced the full “Russia Collusion” immersion experience, where every hysterical conspiracy du jour was explored.
Scarborough’s central accusation was that Russian strongman Vladimir Putin had blackmailed the president of the United States to do his “bidding” with kompromat. Sometimes, Morning Joe merely speculated that the president was “either an agent of Russia” or “a useful idiot.” Other times, he knew the answer: “Vladimir Putin has something he is holding over Donald Trump’s head. And it is bad.”
How bad? “Piece by piece by piece,” Scarborough told his audience, the Steele Dossier, the Democrat-oppo file that included the “pee tape” allegation involving prostitutes in a Moscow hotel, “were all falling into place.”
As we later learned from Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz, it was highly likely that the dossier’s author Michael Steele had been influenced by Russian intelligence assets to include these scandalous claims. Which is to say, Scarborough turned out to be one of the biggest useful idiots in the country.
Speaking of which … when Jonathan Chait wrote his infamous 8,000-word exploration into the “extreme possibility” that Trump had been toiling as a Russian asset since 1987, Scarbrough was all in. “Is he an asset?” he asked his co-host Mika Brzezinski, who responded: “One-hundred percent.”
A president acting as an asset for a foreign adversary would be the biggest scandal in American history. Scarborough regularly made this claim without evidence. Indeed, anyone who failed to fully embrace this outlook was under suspicion of sedition, as well. When regular guest Financial Times editor Edward Luce accused “the entire GOP” of being assets of Russia, Scarborough only bolstered the point. When the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank wrote a column headlined, “Mitch McConnell is a Russian asset” Scarborough soon dubbed the Senate leader “Moscow Mitch.”
Which volume of the Senate intelligence report did Morning Joe rely on to accuse the senior senator from Kentucky of working for Putin?
The Mueller report, in which Scarborough and others had placed so much hope, brims with melodramatic language meant to conceal the inconvenient fact that no criminal conspiracy or coordination with the Russians on the part of anyone in the Trump campaign had been found. The effort, and refusal to call out the phony investigation that was hatched to undermine the legitimacy of the president, surely tarnished Mueller’s legacy. After eight investigations, in fact, no Trump staffer was ever convicted of anything related to “collusion” with Russians.
As for the Senate Intelligence Committee allegations, they were soon undermined when facts about the corrupt origins of the investigation into Trump became known. Six GOP senators, including acting chairman Rubio, who Scarborough mentions as a gotcha, wrote a letter stressing that there was “absolutely no evidence” that Trump or his campaign colluded with Russia.
ROBERT MUELLER HAS DIED AT 81, TRUMP SAYS HE’S ‘GLAD’
We should have some expectation of accountability from journalists — even opinion journalists. Years after it was clear to anyone paying attention that Democrats had concocted collusion claims to sink the first term of Trump, Scarborough was still at it. When, after Trump lost his race in 2020, and it became safe for the journalists to finally begin showing a hint of skepticism about Russia hysteria that undermined the public trust, Scarborough accused these “so-called reporters” of being “useful idiots for Russia” or “on Russia’s payroll.”
The Russia Collusion dead-ender is still at it.