The right wing media attacks on Susan Rice are absurd

Source: Washington Post

The right wing media attacks on Susan Rice are absurd

By Paul Waldman April 4 at 1:48 PM

If you’re an ally (let alone an employee) of Donald Trump, the ever-widening Russia scandal has to have been disheartening. Nearly everyone agrees that the Russian government actively attempted to aid Trump’s presidential campaign, which might be possible to explain away as not Donald Trump’s fault, were it not for the fact that so many of his aides and associates have ties of one form or another to Russia, as does the president himself. So with each new revelation or phase of the investigation, the questions get more and more uncomfortable.

Which is why conservatives have been waiting so desperately for something, anything they can use to turn the story around to their advantage, no matter how ludicrous the arguments they make might be. And now they’ve found it.

And boy, are those arguments ever ludicrous. At this moment, the right wing media is going bonkers over reports that Susan Rice, who was national security adviser at the time, in 2016 requested the “unmasking” of certain U.S. persons who had been picked up in surveillance of foreign intelligence targets. Because those persons turned out to be associates of Donald Trump, conservatives have managed to twist this into the allegation that the Obama administration was “spying” on Trump and his campaign. Over at foxnews.com I count 11 separate articles about Rice on the home page. You can find similar screaming headlines at Breitbart, the Daily Caller, and all the other conservative sites — and don’t ask what’s happening on Twitter (if you want to get a taste of the lunacy, search #SusanRice).

Why the gleeful eruption of accusations? Certain conservative media already had their basic storyline, which is that the problem isn’t Russian meddling in our election, the problem is that somebody revealed Russian meddling in our election. That’s why, along with President Trump, they’re so outraged (or are at least pretending to be outraged) about leaks of the various investigations. But what they lacked was a single villain, and now they have one, someone they hated already and on whom they can focus all their considerable venom.

This afternoon on MSNBC, Rice responded to the allegations. She said, “The allegation that somehow Obama administration officials utilized intelligence for political purposes, that’s absolutely false,” adding that “I leaked nothing to nobody, and never have and never would.”

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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/04/04/the-right-wing-media-attacks-on-susan-rice-are-absurd/?utm_term=.e87664af30f8

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