With its usual venom, The Washington Post breathlessly reports “the famously self-centered” President Trump is “brooding,” “anxious” and “has fretted” about special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation and how it may affect his son, Donald Trump, Jr.
And that’s just the first two paragraphs.
As the story goes on, the bombast continues. Trump’s “indignation” is “boiling over with growing ferocity.” He is “channeling his internal frustration and fear into a ravenous maw of grievance and invective. He is churning out false statements with greater frequency and attacking his perceived enemies with intensifying fury.”
You get the idea.
Mole Hills Into Mountains
In a tweeted reply to this feverish reporting, Trump derided claims that he was worried about his son’s attempt to gain oppositional research during the 2016 presidential campaign as “a complete fabrication,” noting that such meetings are common in the world of politics and “totally legal.”
Fake News reporting, a complete fabrication, that I am concerned about the meeting my wonderful son, Donald, had in Trump Tower. This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics – and it went nowhere. I did not know about it!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 5, 2018
Trump Jr. held one meeting in 2016 with a Russian woman with alleged Kremlin ties who apparently had no damaging information on Hillary Clinton at all.
Indeed the president has every right to wonder where this leftist media concern about nefarious “opposition research” meetings with foreigners was when former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele was peddling his thoroughly unverified “Trump Dossier” to the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Remember Christopher Steele?
As Breitbart reports, “Steele’s dossier was produced by Fusion GPS, which was paid for its anti-Trump work by Trump’s primary political opponents, namely Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) via the Perkins Coie law firm.”
This paid anti-Trump oppositional research was then “reportedly utilized by the FBI in part to conduct its probe into Trump over unsubstantiated claims of collusion with Russia.”
Steele even met with Obama State Department officials to brief them on his outlandish “findings,” which include lurid accounts of Russian moves to acquire kompromat on Trump via the use of prostitutes and an infamous alleged “pee tape.”
Government agents working for a sitting Democrat president using oppositional research acquired from a former foreign intelligence asset in an attempt to attack the opponent of that president’s would-be Dem successor would certainly seem to be a far bigger story than Donald Trump Jr. meeting once with a woman with apparent ties to the Kremlin and gaining zero useful information from that meeting.
Amazingly, despite the clear fact of Steele’s paid-for machinations on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign, former Obama administration White House ethics czar Norm Eisen had the temerity to respond to President Trump’s tweet by stating oppositional research meetings similar to Trump Jr.’s effort “never happened on our watch and if [they] had our reaction would have been ‘call the FBI,'” the Hill reports.
Calling the FBI is apparently just what Obama officials did after receiving Steele’s dossier. They called the FBI and said, “see how you can take down Trump with this.”
What’s Not Reported
Perhaps even more disturbing than the arrogant hypocrisy on display here is the way The Washington Post will not stop hyping small beans on the Russia obsession trail at the same time news breaks that a powerful longtime Democratic senator had an actual Chinese communist spy on her personal staff for two decades.
While The Post was scouring its thesaurus for new ways to portray President Trump as foaming at the mouth, it was completely ignoring the news that Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s driver of 20 years was a spy who passed information to officials at the Chinese consulate.
Chinese Embassy Washington D.C
Feinstein has strong ties to China going back decades. A 1997 Los Angeles Times article details how Feinstein’s husband Richard C. Blum started investing in China with “one project worth less than $500,000” in 1992 and suddenly was planning on investing $150 million two years later.
As that was happening, the Times account reported that:
Meanwhile, Feinstein’s role on U.S. policy toward China has expanded. In January 1995, she became a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, giving her a prominent platform for her efforts to support China’s trade privileges.
Since 1995, Feinstein has made three visits to confer with senior government officials in Beijing. Blum has accompanied her each time at his own expense and has attended many of her meetings with President Jiang Zemin and other top Chinese leaders – an unusual degree of access for a private businessman.
Instead of finding synonyms for “bellowed,” one would think The Washington Post would be busy looking up the Chinese word for “kompromat.”
Yet a search of The Post’s site for the past week shows not a single article about the Feinstein spy story. A google search on “Trump” “Washington Post” as this article was being written revealed that the first article displayed was “Trump just made 2 problematic admissions about the Trump Tower meeting.”
A similar google search on “Feinstein” “Washington Post” and the first article displayed was “Dianne Feinstein’s brave act of patriotism.”
Perhaps it’s time for The Post to either rein in its bias or at the very least, prioritize real news over partisan gossip.
