The Right's Big Reveal About Obama's Iran Back-Channel Is Fake News

Jared Kushner did something that was anything but normal or good. To defend the indefensible, a rumor begins nearly a decade later that Obama had done the same thing, only worse.

MICHAEL TOMASKY
06.02.17 12:00 AM ET

One of the frequent gambits of the right whenever some Republican gets caught doing something that pushes the envelope of our norms and traditions is to hit the Googles and find one example of some Democrat doing something vaguely similar and then say “See? Everybody does it.”

The classic example here is the Robert Byrd party. That is, some Republican says some crazy racist thing or is discovered to have spoken to one of those “citizen’s council”-type groups, something any politician should have stopped doing 50 years ago. People like me bang on about it. And conservatives invariably fire back with: “Yeah, but Robert Byrd was in the KKK, libtard!” It was 70 years ago, and Byrd renounced his membership and apologized for it a hundred times, and anyway he’s been pushing up Mountain State daisies for seven years now. But they’ll never stop with the Byrd thing. It’s F4 on conservatives’ computers.

This brings us to the matter at hand, which is the explosive story The Washington Post posted last Friday about Jared Kushner proposing to Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that they set up a communications back-channel using Russian communications equipment. Of all the Russia-related scoops of the young Trump era, this one may well have been the biggest.

It’s out of bounds for an incoming administration to seek to have secret negotiations with any other country. But to want to have them with an adversary that our intelligence agencies had concluded meddled in our election—which was public knowledge well before the time of Kushner’s chat with Kislyak—is way out of bounds. And to propose that the discussion be held through the adversary’s channels is more than way out of bounds.

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