Fox News’ Brit Hume doesn’t need to wait for any investigation to conclude before arriving at a verdict about Jared Kushner’s numerous, suspicious contacts with Russia: Not Guilty! While he was at it, Hume suggested the rest of the family is probably innocent, too.
Senior Political Analyst Hume appeared on Special Report tonight to give a glowing review of Kushner’s 11-page statement seeking to explain his behavior about Russia. Hume was so taken with it, I’m surprised he didn’t stand up and call the whole Russia investigation a witch hunt.
HUME: Bear in mind that Jared Kurshner’s now represented by one of the sharpest criminal defense lawyers in town. That would be Abbe Lowell. Now, this behavior of his, volunteering to come forward, volunteering to testify, issuing a detailed 11-page statement ahead of any testimony is not the kind of thing any smart defense lawyer would ask you to do unless he, the lawyer, were pretty convinced that you were telling the truth and could back it up. Otherwise, you’re exposing your client to a potential perjury prosecution. So this is the kind of move that under normal circumstances would be considered quite risky.
So what you get here, then, is a guy coming forward, bringing all this information forward, obviously carefully gone through and gone over by him and his lawyers to make sure that all i’s are dotted, t’s are crossed, and the rest of it.
It’s an unusual strategy and it suggests to me that you’d never let your client do this if you thought he were guilty of anything and if the statements weren’t true.
[…]
Not only did he say he was not involved in the collusion, he said he didn’t know anybody who was. Now, as close as he is to the inner circle with Mr. Trump, then candidate Trump, you kind of would have to believe that if it was going on, he’d have known about it. And if he knew about it, he’s not going to put forward a statement that ends up being under oath that says he didn’t know anything about it.
But a few hours before Hume delivered this slobbering “analysis,” Fox’s own Shepard Smith pointed out one big hole in Kushner’s story claiming ignorance of the meeting that promised damaging information on Hillary Clinton. Raw Story explains:
“Okay, hang on,” Smith interrupted. “There’s an email, and at the top of that email there is a subject line — let’s look at that subject line. Here it is, this is an email from Donald Trump Jr, sent on Wednesday the 8th of June at noon or so. The subject line: ‘Russia — Clinton — private and confidential.’”
“So what he is saying is he didn’t read deep into the email and we are to believe that he didn’t read the subject line?” he added.
Watch Hume acquit Kushner – and the whole Trump family – below, from the July 24, 2017 Special Report. Underneath is a segment from today’s Shepard Smith Reporting, too.
He lost his son tragically 20 odd years ago and claimed a religious epiphany in his grief. “I went through my adult life with little thought day by day of God or Christ or any of the rest of it. I just didn’t think about it very much. When my son died in 1998, you know, when something shattering like that happens, I think it’s likely to be a moment where you find out what you really believe, and as horrible as that was, and it was bad, and it was heartbreaking and it was unexpected and it was very painful, I had the feeling through it all, that God was there, that He would rescue me from grief and pain, and that, I would get through it, and I knew I believed, and I knew it with enormous force. And things happened during that period that I looked to Him as the only reasonable explanation.”
Sounds sincere and heartfelt – yet even as he approaches his own inevitable demise, he has no problem whatsoever in throwing himself behind the most unscrupulous, uncaring, un-Christian charlatan ever to raise his ugly, festering head in American politics. He has even taken part in the coordinated shenanigans designed to cover Trump’s arse – a glaring example being his involvement in Fox’s out-of-the-blue chorus of ‘Hey, collusion isn’t a crime’ about a month ago.
WTF is going on in that nodding old bulldog head of his? He SEEMS like a man who can justify his words and actions, at least to himself, but the cognitive dissonance in that grey matter must be positively deafening.
He was just so taken with it that if he had stood up he coulda hosted a three ring circus in his pants.