Although we can all laugh at “straight news” reporter Catherine Herridge’s ridiculous spin of Donald Trump’s phone attempts to get Ukraine to dig up dirt on Joe Biden, most of what she said was no laughing matter.
This morning, the White House released a memo of the call that is now at the center of the impeachment inquiry. Herridge appeared on America’s Newsroom today to give a purportedly straight news report on its contents. But as we’ve come to expect from her, she packed her “reporting” with pro-Trump talking points.
Fox’s ‘straight news’ anchor and reporter falsely refer to the Ukraine call summary as a ‘transcript'
The document released by the White House explicitly states it is not a transcript. But that did not stop Fox News anchor or “Chief Intelligence Correspondent” Herridge from calling it a transcript.
First, Hemmer described the memo just as the White House would have wanted:
HEMMER: The White House claims the transcript shows there were no promises made to Ukraine in return for releasing military aid. There is no quid pro quo, no pressure at all. The Justice Department today pushing back on the claim that the whistleblower complaint was an urgent concern requiring the attention of Congress. That's the backdrop.
Herridge picked up the misnomer:
HERRIDGE: We have reviewed the transcript and let's just walk folks at home through a tick-tock of events. This call took place on July 25. It was a half-hour call between 9:03 and 9:33 A.M., and the transcript is approximately five pages in length.
Herridge fails to note how Trump’s request for “a favor” from Ukraine immediately follow Zelensky’s request for military aid that Trump was secretly blocking
HERRIDGE: It begins with the president congratulating the Ukrainian president on his election victory. Then they have a very specific discussion about foreign aid. The president says, "The U.S. is a strong supporter of Ukraine," and then he complains that the Europeans are not doing enough to support that country. And then this is the key part of the transcript. There is an ask from the president to the Ukrainian counterpart and it reads, "I would like to you do us a favor, though, because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine. They say Crowdstrike." That appears to be a reference to the hacking of the Clinton emails in 2016. "I guess you have one of your wealthy people, the server, they say Ukraine has it."
As The New York Times noted in its annotations of the memo, while Trump did not explicitly link his request to unfreezing aid, he was “holding back hundreds of millions of dollars in military assistance to Ukraine that Congress had appropriated to help that country fend off Russian aggression.” Furthermore, Trump “brings up the idea of reciprocity, suggesting that the United States has been good to Ukraine even though something Ukraine has done is not good. The next thing Mr. Trump said — after Mr. Zelensky responded to this statement — was to ask for investigations.”
Funny how Herridge found none of that worth mentioning.
Herridge ‘missed’ the significance of Trump involving Attorney General William Barr and Rudy Giuliani
HERRIDGE: And then he continues. This is the most fulsome discussion of Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. "There's a lot of talk about Biden's son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great." That's Attorney General William Barr. "Biden went about bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it. It sounds horrible to me."
Then the Ukrainian president responds, talking about the prosecutor he will have in place to look specifically at this issue that relates to the natural gas company Burisma. He states, "He or she will look into the situation specifically to the company that you mentioned in this issue. The issue of the investigation of the case is actually the issue to restore the honesty." Seems to be a reference to integrity, sort of anti-corruption. "So we will take care of that and we will work on the investigation of the case. Mr. Trump then responds, "I will have Mr. Giuliani give you a call and I'm also going to have Attorney General Barr call and we will get to the bottom of it. I'm sure you will figure it out."
As The Washington Post’s Paul Waldman explained, we already know that private-citizen and personal Trump attorney Giuliani was apparently running a kind of shadow State Department. But what could Barr’s involvement possibly have to do with his job as America’s chief law enforcement official? Furthermore, that suggests the Justice Department had a serious conflict of interest when it gave the Director of National Intelligence a written legal opinion justifying his refusal to turn over the whistleblower’s complaint to Congress. That whistleblower complaint is not just about this phone call but includes other Trump behavior as yet unknown.
Yet, Herridge suggested there was nothing to see in any involvement of Giuliani and Barr. Even though later in her report, she unquestioningly reported that the Department of Justice had concluded that Trump’s “ask” was not a campaign violation - another possible conflict of interest.
Herridge ridiculously minimizes Trump’s attempts to get Ukraine to find dirt on Biden
HERRIDGE: The key thing from the initial reading of this transcript, Bill, is that there are not multiple references, as widely reported, to the former vice president and his son. Based on our count, there's a key reference and then some follow-on references, so a handful, approximately three. And then I would also emphasize that there is no clear link in the transcript between this withheld aid and the promise of a prosecution in this particular case, Bill.
Besides Herridge’s laughable contradictory claim about Biden references, anyone not in the tank for Trump would have seen that while Trump only mentions Biden’s name three times, the bulk of Trump’s remarks are about his desire for an investigation
Anchor Bill Hemmer did not question a word
Any legit news anchor would have at least pressed Herridge on the crucial bits of information she left out. But not Hemmer! When Herridge finished her selective summary of the White House summary, Hemmer pushed for the Department of Justice's talking points: “OK, so what do we know about how all this unfolded, there? You go to DOJ this morning and what happened after that, Catherine.”
Did I miss any of the propaganda? If so, let me know in the comments. The clip is below, from the September 25, 2019 America’s Newsroom.
(H/T Media Matters for the transcript)