Rachel Maddow just nailed it
On Sunday night, the AP broke arguably the most important story in Donald Trump’s whistleblower scandal to date, when it reported that Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and Rick Perry were abusing their government positions to extort a Ukraine gas company into funneling money into the pockets of their allies. It was poised to dominate Monday’s news cycle and change the course of the impeachment narrative, until… well, Trump did something even worse.
After Donald Trump announced that he was immediately and disastrously pulling all U.S. troops out of northern Syria, Palmer Report said this: “This Syria-Turkey stunt is to distract from last night’s AP bombshell that he and Rudy were trying to extort money out of a Ukrainian gas company. And it’s working – no one is covering this crucial story.”
Sure enough, during the course of the day on Monday, the media (somewhat understandably) allowed the Ukraine gas company story to all but completely get lost in the shuffle. If Trump really did announce this stunt late last night in order to make sure the Ukraine bombshell got flushed out of the news cycle, it sure worked well.
But then came Rachel Maddow. During her Monday evening show, she made a point of covering the Ukraine gas company story. She made it important, and she spelled out how Donald Trump is trying to redefine the word “corruption” so that it loses its meaning, even as he falsely accuses his adversaries of doing precisely what he and his camp are doing. Maddow nailed it. Hopefully, as the dust settles on Tuesday, the rest of the media will decide to make the Ukraine gas scandal important.
