Lee Smith: Everything Media Accuse Trump of Doing with Russia, Obama Actually Did
“Everything they’re accusing Trump of … Obama had done,” said Lee Smith of “Trump-Russia collusion” narratives pushed by Democrats and their news media allies.
Smith, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, joined SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight for a Thursday interview with Breitbart News’s Senior Editors-at-Large Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak to discuss his latest article, “The Media Stopped Reporting the Russia Collusion Story Because They Helped Create It.”
Smith highlighted the Washington Post’s Anne Applebaum, the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, and the New Yorker’s David Remnick as hypocritical news media figures in their criticisms of the Trump administration’s supposed appeasement of Russia and Vladimir Putin after ignoring actual appeasement of Russia and Vladimir Putin across eight years of the Obama administration.
On March 26, 2012, then-President Barack Obama told then-Russian President Dmitri Medvedev that he would have “more flexibility” in shaping U.S. foreign policy toward Russia after that year’s presidential election:
“Big-name” and “respected’ journalists like Applebaum, Goldberg, and Remnick “enlisted their bylines in a political campaign on behalf of the Democratic candidate for president,” wrote Smith. In so doing, the trio of left-wing Democrat news media figures “rehearsed the talking points [Christopher Steele] later documented.”
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Special counsel Robert Mueller’s ostensible investigation into the “Russian government’s attempts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election” is predicated on lies within the “Christopher Steele dossier,” said Smith: “The Mueller investigation is premised on the Steele dossier. It’s premised on nonsense.”
Steele’s allegations – paid for by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee – were central to the procurement of surveillance warrants via the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) for Trump campaign operatives Carter Page and George Papadopoulos (FISC) at the request of Justice Department and FBI officials during the Obama administration.
“It’s insane. … She’s describing some scenario that’s out of a B movie about all these conspiracies taking place,” said Smith of Applebaum’s 2016 warning that Russia would determine the outcome of the year’s presidential election.
In her September 8, 2016, article entitled “How Russia could spark a U.S. electoral disaster,” Applebaum warned that “Russian hackers will seek to break into the U.S. voting system [and] attempt to throw the election.” She further claimed the Russian state “might try to get Trump elected,” or even Clinton.” Alternatively — and this would, of course, be even more devastating — [Russia] might try to rig the election for Clinton, perhaps leaving a trail of evidence designed to connect the rigging operation to Clinton’s campaign.”
At the time, Pollak described Applebaum’s warning as a “bizarre conspiracy theory.”
Applebaum is regularly featured across television news media outlets as a non-ideological and non-partisan expert of international affairs, with a focus on Europe and Russia.
Left-wing and Democrat-aligned news media outlets succeeded in their desire to prompt a federal investigation of Donald Trump and his presidential campaign to diffuse the public’s attention toward the ostensible investigation of Hillary Clinton’s felonious mishandling of classified information and evasion of record-keeping laws, said Smith.
“Journalists were participating in a political campaign,” said Smith. “Hillary had an investigation, so the idea was, ‘Well, let’s stick Trump with an investigation, too.’ And that’s what they got. They got an investigation of the Trump campaign, which was insane enough.”
The fraudulent investigation of the Trump campaign then morphed into an attempt to nullify the outcome of 2016’s presidential election, said Smith.
“After the election, it turned into something even worse,” said Smith. “It turned into an attack, not just on the president. … The purpose was to delegitimize the political choice that American voters made in electing the person that they wanted to be president. It’s an absolutely obscene campaign that the press waged. First, it was against Trump. Then, it was against the American public.”
Steele had utilized an “echo chamber” strategy among left-wing and partisan news media allies to push the “Trump-Russia collusion” narrative upon the American electorate, wrote Smith: “Much of the Russiagate campaign was conducted in this circular manner. Steele and Simpson built an echo chamber with their opposition research, parts of the law enforcement and intelligence communities, and the press all reinforcing one another.”
The news media are broadly avoiding the “falling apart” of Mueller’s ostensible investigation given their central role in its genesis, said Smith.
“Everything they’re accusing Trump of leaning toward, the Obama administration has done,” said Smith. “In Ukraine, in Syria. Whether or not you agree with Obama’s policy — I did not — but whether or not you agree with it, the fact is this is what the Obama administration did. All of a sudden, for the same people, like David Remnick, like Jeffrey Goldberg, who were speaking with President Obama extensively [and] repeatedly, for them to somehow ignore that this is what Obama had done and that suddenly, Trump was this insane outlier, that this had never happened before, that, in itself, was a huge tell.”
Breitbart News Tonight airs Monday through Friday on SiriusXM’s Patriot channel 125 from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern (6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific).
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