The Mueller report was a vindication – for the media
For those of us who read it (or read much of it, anyway), there’s a reason the Mueller report felt like a summary of what we already learned over the last two years. The mainstream media spent that time reporting on Donald Trump’s scandals, which was decried as “fake news” by Trump and his drooling acolytes, turned out to all be accurate news in the final analysis, thanks to the details revealed in the Mueller Report.
In the end, all that the Washington Post and New York Times had to go on were mere reporters and their sources. But Robert Mueller was able to draw on a vast nexus of government law enforcement agencies and organizations, wiretaps and discrete surveillance, top secret memos and emails, firsthand government sources and direct testimony. And Mueller came to the nearly exact same conclusions as the so-called fake news.
So let’s have no more tolerating of this “fake news” crap. These paranoid conspiracy-mongers have been exposed at last. The criers of “fake news” can’t have it both ways. They can’t simultaneously embrace, however disingenuously, the Mueller report, and disparage the news sources who have been writing the same thing for the preceding two years. Reality doesn’t work that way.
Take the June 9, 2016, meeting in Trump Tower, for instance. It was (hilariously, at first) “explained” as a straightforward conversation about adoption of Russian children, and any pundits who suggested otherwise were condemned as fake news. It was not about adoption of Russian babies, of course. It was about receiving stolen information that had been altered so as to be condemnatory of Hillary Clinton. Trump later confessed as much, after belligerently insisting that it’s “totally legal and done all the time in politics.” In other words, he lied about it to begin with. In other words, Trump was the only source of fake news.
The real purveyors of fake news are Donald Trump and the blithering morons who still think he’s the messiah. Once you’re caught in nine thousand lies, you have lost the right to call anyone a liar or “fake news.” The Mueller report has exposed, finally and for all time, we should hope, that the mainstream media was telling the truth all along – and that Donald Trump, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Kellyanne Conway and Trump’s millions of liegemen are the actual traffickers in fake news.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.