New York – President Donald Trump and his team love to deride unfavorable stories as “fake news,” but it’s clear from Robert Mueller’s report…
New York – President Donald Trump and his team love to deride unfavorable stories as “fake news,” but it’s clear from Robert Mueller’s report that the special counsel isn’t buying it.
While there are a few exceptions, Mueller’s investigation repeatedly supports news reporting that was done on the Russia probe over the last two years and details several instances where the president and his team sought to mislead the public.
“The media looks a lot stronger today than it did before the release of this report,” Kyle Pope, editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, said Friday.
Trump’s supporters believe that Mueller’s determination that there was not enough evidence to show that the president or his team worked with the Russians to influence the 2016 election delegitimizes the attention given to the story.
Fox News Channel’s Laura Ingraham message to the news media: “You owe us an apology.”
But the news stories were, for the great part, accurate.
For instance, Mueller’s report shows The New York Times and The Washington Post were correct when they reported in January 2018 that Trump ordered White House counsel Don McGahn to make sure Mueller was fired, and that McGahn decided to resign rather than carry that out. When the Times first reported the story, Trump described it as “fake news, folks, fake news.”
The Mueller report also showed that Trump directed a series of aides to ask McGahn to publicly deny the story, and ultimately asked himself, too. McGahn refused, saying the story was accurate, the report found.
In a July 2017 story, the Times reported that the president personally wrote a statement in which he falsely said that an election year meeting between some Russians and his son, Donald Jr.
