Before knowing what’s in the Mueller report, Donald Trump's unofficial Media Monitor Mollie Hemingway smugly suggested Dear Leader was found innocent and that reporters, Democrats and government officials who have suggested otherwise be “held accountable.”
It has been revealed that the Mueller report does not recommend new indictments. However, that does not mean that no new indictments are coming. As The New York Times reported, this “might seem like the conclusion of a long-running drama, but it is only the end of the beginning.” There are still Congressional investigations that could refer criminal charges to the Department of Justice, the Times noted. Also, some of Mueller’s work will continue without him:
Even though Mr. Mueller’s report is complete, some aspects of his inquiry remain active and may be overseen by the same prosecutors once they are reassigned to their old jobs within the Justice Department. For instance, recently filed court documents suggest that investigators are still examining why the former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort turned over campaign polling data in 2016 to a Russian associate whom prosecutors said was tied to Russian intelligence.
Also, as Politico reported, “Federal prosecutors, state investigators and congressional committees are all conducting probes into potential crimes that have spun out of Mueller’s work, or that are tied to the president’s business dealings, campaign and inaugural committee’s fundraising efforts.”
But Hemingway acted as though the report – which almost nobody has seen – exonerated Trump. “Well, this is a very interesting conclusion to a lengthy investigation,” she said, with a smirk on her face. In her condescending voice, she described the Russia investigation as, essentially, “a political operation, sort of secretly bought and paid for by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee.”
She dismissed the possibility that Mueller may have found wrongdoing by Trump that will go unindicted because a president can’t be indicted. In that case, she asserted, “You’d not see one indictment, you’d be seeing dozens if not hundreds of indictments of people who were involved.” Oh, you mean like Roger Stone? That case will continue. Prosecutors just requested more time to go through evidence they seized from him. It’s quite conceivable that some information found will lead to more indictments.
But after acknowledging, “We do have to wait and see exactly what the report says,” she was ready to start weaponizing it regardless.
“If there is nothing there that matches what we heard from the media for many years, there needs to be a reckoning and the people who spread this theory, both inside and outside the government who were not critical and did not behave appropriately, need to be held accountable.”
Host Bret Baier didn’t utter a word of pushback.
Watch Hemingway’s vicious shilling, cloaked in “fairness” below, from the March 22, 2019 Special Report.
Hemingway was indeed smirking through both of her lengthy commentaries (she was given the most time to speak and was not challenged on any of the numerous lies she told). Her intent was to repeat the usual Right Wing propaganda spins about the story, hoping that she might get the “last word” on it. From the beginning of the Pence White House’s occupation, we’ve had this Right Wing sneer running that really plays like the schoolyard taunt of “I’m rubber and you’re glue and everything you say bounces off me and sticks to you.” The problem with that sneer is not only that it’s childish (like everything else in the Pence White House) but also that it shows a complete inability to deal with facts and reality.
Hemingway once again complained about how long the probe has been going on, with no irony about the fact that the GOP spent far longer chasing President Clinton, President Obama and Hillary Clinton on baseless conspiracy theories, including wasting millions of dollars and years of the Congress’ time on the Benghazi attack. Hemingway bemoaned that the time spent on this investigation somehow ruined the first two years of the Pence White House, which is again ironic – she was delighted to champion any and every single possible charge against the Obama White House.
Hemingway repeatedly lied here about the basis for the Mueller Probe, saying that it was only about a “Russian narrative” of Trump being a Russian agent and implying that there was no reason for the surveillance or the indictments that have happened. She was hoping you won’t notice that actually there was a lot of fishy behavior by Trump associates that triggered the investigations and the warrants – not just the one dossier. Hemingway repeated the Right Wing lie that the investigation was just a “political operation…secretly bought by Hillary Clinton and the DNC”. One more time: The Steele Dossier was requested, initiated and funded by REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES – it only moved over to the Dems after Trump clinched the nomination.
Hemingway also lied about the indictments we’ve seen, playing the Right Wing card that these were all just for “process crimes” that happened because of trick questions. In reality, the individuals, including Michael Flynn, usually pled to lesser charges than the ones they could have faced. Any IDIOT with a minute of experience with prosecution would know this. And bigger fish like Paul Manafort were convicted of extremely serious crimes, which is why he will wind up in prison for years.
Hemingway finished with what sounds like the new Right Wing spin about Mueller, assuming that his report doesn’t take the Pence White House too much to task for their behavior – that being that this report is just a whitewash of “reckless actions” by the FBI leading up to the probe. Which is complete nonsense, but it helped Hemingway once again throw in the notion that there should now be prosecutions of Hillary Clinton and all of her staff, since Hemingway thinks that somehow Clinton was caught lying and wasn’t treated the same as the Pence folk. (In reality, all the wasted time on the Benghazi and email investigations of Hillary Clinton resulted in the conclusion that no crimes were committed – and the Clinton people were extremely forthcoming in discussing whatever was asked, as opposed to the stonewalling by the Pence White House).
Hemingway took an ominous tone, saying that “there needs to be a reckoning” for anyone who said anything other than that Donald Trump is a saint. (Tucker Carlson would repeat this an hour later, expressly demanding that Trump pardon Roger Stone and demanding that all the Dems he hates resign immediately along with Jeff Zucker at CNN. If I were Tucker Carlson, I’d be thinking a bit more about how all his sponsors have abandoned his program and how perhaps there’s someone he knows a lot better who should be thinking about resigning.) Hemingway tried to take a moral tone about how this was about needing “to speak truth to power” when it comes to FBI investigations. Hemingway ignored that people have been speaking truth to power throughout the attempted bullying by the Pence White House, and have been met by open derision by Trump and his sycophants. Jeff Mason of Reuters tried to respond to Hemingway’s nonsense by pointing out that the reckoning needs to be for the people in the Pence White House who have spent 2 years attacking the FBI and Robert Mueller, including Donald Trump himself. Hemingway wasn’t having it, though. She dismissed that concern because it’s just so complicated of an issue and it could take years for everyone to understand it. (Meaning: Hemingway is giving Trump and the Pence White House an excuse to once again not apologize for their childish behavior.)
One final thing stood out for me in Hemingway’s smug lies. She played a card about how the entire investigation was about “weaponizing policy differences”, that somehow these guys were indicted just because they were Right Wingers. This is the same nonsense that Right Wingers were peddling back in the 1980s about Iran/Contra, which they said was about “the criminalization of policy differences”. Except that it’s a lie in both cases – and it’s the same lie. The Right Wing just hopes that you won’t notice it. In reality, these were matters of people committing crimes and getting caught. Period. If any policy was involved, it was being pursued through criminal means. Michael Flynn wasn’t prosecuted for saying nasty things about President Obama. He was prosecuted because he was openly working for a foreign nation, and because he was caught playing footsie with foreign agents on the phone even before he could get to the White House in 2017. Hemingway’s false moral outrage about “policy differences” might better be directed at most of the pundits at Fox News, who have repeatedly tried to bully everyone else in the country into shutting up.