We know that Donald Trump lost the last election to now-President Joe Biden. We also know that the idea that Donald Trump was a Russian asset was the creation of the FBI, the media and the Hillary Clinton campaign. And we know that the story that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russia disinformation was a cover story created in coordination with the Biden campaign and that Joe Biden unabashedly lied about it in the presidential debate.
The media does a great job in making sure they bat down conspiracy theories about the last election’s vote count, directly rebutting it in the middle of news stories. But when it comes to these other facts, while majorities now get it correctly, large segments of the public still cling to false views, regardless of the public record.
Last week, Special Counsel John Durham issued his report after four years of study. While the Mueller investigation found no evidence of a Trump-Russia conspiracy and the Justice Department Inspector General report found that the FBI’s spying on Trump officials crossed lines, the Durham report methodically traced the reports of Trump-Russia collusion to their sources and found them either unverified, fabricated, or simply planted by the Clinton campaign and echoed by the media and the FBI by a group of anti-Trump FBI leaders.
The combination of these three reports peels back layers of the onion that absorbed the country for years with breathless "bombshell" false statements from people like California Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff that evidence of collusion was at hand.
It was stoked every night by MSNBC and other media. One prominent journalist who later said the stories were ill-advised, once confided in me, he believed that Trump would be gone soon because Mueller had an internal source that was spilling the beans.
But there were no beans.
While a 56% majority of Americans now reject the notion that Trump was a Russian asset according to the May Harvard-Harris poll, 70% of Democrats still believe that it is a true story. Only half the country has even heard of the Durham report.
In the Watergate era a report from a special counsel documenting FBI abuses and partisanship would have had banner headlines and editorials demanding resignations and reforms.
And confusion reigns on what the Durham report actually says. Fifty-two percent of voters who had heard of it thought it concluded the FBI’s investigation of Trump was well-founded – even though it argues the opposite.
You can’t expect the average American to read a 306-page report, but we can expect the media to analyze fully a report like this on how our intelligence agencies derailed investigations of the Clintons and other Democrats while jumping the gun on investigating Trump and renewing unjustified wiretap warrants.
You expect them to be direct and honest with their readers on the content of the report. The opinion pages might take issue with the report’s findings, but the news pages should have been crystal clear that the report points to massive failures in policy and procedures, pointing a finger at a failure of values in the people running the organizations.
Similarly, the Hunter Biden laptop is real, not a fiction, and that means the emails that refer to Joe Biden as receiving an undisclosed share of influence peddling contracts need to be addressed and answered by an honest, probing press.
After the revelation that the letter from 51 intelligence officials was concocted after a call from then Biden campaign adviser Anthony Blinken to former CIA director Mike Morrell and signed in time for use in the debate, 59% of America now agrees the laptop is real. But 59% of Democrats still hold onto the belief that it is Russian disinformation.
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The replay of Joe Biden’s debate response is chilling, as he called a laptop he knew to be real, "garbage." It raises questions about how truthful Biden has been about all of the issues relating to his son’s influence peddling business, though in three years Biden has faced nothing but the most superficial questioning on the topic even as 53% now believe he was involved.
Rightly or wrongly, Bill and Hillary Clinton in the ’90s were relentlessly peppered with media questions about their business dealings as all presidents in those days received equally thorough treatment from the press, regardless of whether they wore the red or blue banner.
As Durham documents, when the press goes along for the ride rather than asking the tough questions, public officials can abandon their principles to act instead on partisan impulses, even getting rewarded with book deals and commentary contracts from that same partisan media.
Equal justice under law, however, devolves into a farce.
