Even in the face of Donald Trump Jr. admitting that he met with a Russian lawyer in hopes of getting Kremlin-flavored “opposition research” about Hillary Clinton, the most diehard Trump supporters refuse to accept that it happened. It’s likely that some of them are being influenced by the alternative fact du jour. Lately, pro-Trump “news” sites have peddled the claim that the meeting was a false flag orchestrated by Trump’s opponents, particularly Democrats. On Monday, two of Trump’s most loyal supporters on the religious right joined that chorus.
First up–Pat Robertson. On Monday’s edition of “The 700 Club,” he claimed that Democrats actually set up the meeting in order to prove they could be thorns in Trump’s side. People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch got a clip.
Robertson was chatting with veteran conservative columnist Bill Gertz about Gertz’ upcoming book, “iWar: War and Peace in the Information Age.” About 19 minutes into the show, the discussion turned to Trump’s meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and others in June 2016.
Robertson mused that the meeting was orchestrated by the Democratic opposition research firm Fusion GPS–the same firm that retained Christopher Steele, the investigator behind the “golden showers” dossier that contended Russia had compromised Trump. Robertson, like most Trump diehards, dismissed Steele as a “bogus British spy.” Never mind that a number of Western intelligence agencies believe the dossier is legitimate, and that key portions of the dossier have been independently corroborated by American intelligence.
Robertson suspected that Fusion GPS set up the meeting because they actually “wanted to get caught” so they could prove their ability to “disrupt America if Trump won.” Gertz agreed, saying that it was part of a “liberal left narrative” to undermine “the duly elected president of the United States.” He claimed that all the talk about Trump colluding with Russia was designed to conceal, among other things, the Obama administration wiretapping the Trump transition team. Never mind that the FBI has found no evidence of such wiretapping.
Around the same time that Robertson was peddling this, Rick Wiles of TruNews joined the alternative fact chorus. He claimed that the meeting was actually a booby trap orchestrated by Democratic and deep state elements to discredit Trump, and possibly manufacture evidence to impeach him if he won. Right Wing Watch got a clip.
Wiles led off Monday’s show by claiming that Veselnitskaya was a longtime associate of Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson–proof that there was “a skunk in the garden.” He claimed the Democrats and the deep state–or the “dark state,” as he calls it–set up the meeting out of fear that they wouldn’t be able to “steal enough votes” to give Hillary the presidency.
In this narrative, the meeting with Donald Jr. was “Plan B: sabotage the Trump presidency if he won in November.” As far as Wiles was concerned, the meeting was part of a scheme to plant “fake evidence” against Trump in order to grease the wheels for impeachment and removal.
There are so many problems with this line from the Virginia Beach and Vero Beach Ayatollahs that it’s hard to know where to start. For one thing, if this is true, then why have we been getting “lie after lie after lie,” as Shepard Smith put it, about what happened at that meeting? Why did Trump’s own lawyers wait three weeks to tell Trump about the meeting? Why did Donald Jr. only release the email exchange in which the meeting was set up after The New York Times told him it was about to release it?
Most importantly, the one person in that meeting who could have and should have smelled a rat did absolutely nothing about it. Namely, then-campaign chief Paul Manafort. While most of the Trumps’ defenders have claimed that the Trumps were mere novices to politics, Manafort has been in this game since the 1970s. If anyone should have known this meeting was improper at best and illegal at worst, it was Manafort. He was the one person who should have known to immediately report this overture to the FBI.
So even if you buy the line that this meeting was a false flag, no Trump loyalist has offered an explanation for why the one person in the room who could have blown the whistle on it failed to do so. Without such an explanation, whenever they talk about Donald Jr. being a victim rather than a perpetrator, they might as well sound like Peanuts adults. But they haven’t offered one. And that’s because, in the absence of something we haven’t heard or seen, there isn’t any.
(featured image courtesy Gage Skidmore, available under a Creative Commons BY-SA license)
