Rachel Maddow is shameless. She’s Teflon, though, being the face of MSNBC primetime, so she can and has written her ticket with the network. Still, it was pure comedy hour when Donald Trump delivered an address at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, following his arraignment in South Florida. The former president has been indicted again in the classified materials investigation. He remains defiant and committed to his 2024 campaign while highlighting the gross hypocrisy regarding how the Justice Department has handled cases of alleged mishandling of sensitive materials. Yet, Maddow refused to cut to the speech.
Why? Because she explained, there’s a cost to broadcasting untrue things. I almost fell over because Maddow is the queen of elaborating on untrue things. She’s InfoWars packaged in learned diction, like when she blamed the ambush deaths of four American soldiers in Niger on Trump’s executive order on immigration, which the liberal media erroneously called the Muslim ban in 2017. And did we forget about her prolonged obsession with the Steele Dossier, the document that launched the Russian collusion hoax? The Durham Report delivered the final kill shot to the Clinton campaign-funded opposition research file loaded with Russian disinformation and regarded as unverifiable drivel. Maddow was laser focused on trying to present the dossier as authentic. It wasn’t it was untrue (via WaPo):
In March 2017, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow invited Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) onto her show to talk Russia. She noted that in a House hearing, Schiff had cited the 35-page dossier of memorandums compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. Ever since that document had burst into national politics — and surfaced on the BuzzFeed website in January 2017 — Maddow had closely monitored its reception.
Each time she addressed the dossier, she was careful to alert viewers that it was unverified. But she had espied some developments that appeared to support the dossier’s nitty-gritty. So she asked Schiff: “When you cited … that dossier, should we stop describing that as an uncorroborated dossier? Has some of the information of that been corroborated?”
[…]
…the host glommed onto recent reporting by CNN and the New Yorker to the effect that U.S. authorities had confirmed that “some of the conversations described in the dossier took place between the same individuals on the same days and from the same locations as detailed in the dossier,” according to CNN. The New Yorker wrote that U.S. intelligence had confirmed “some of its less explosive claims, relating to conversations with foreign nationals.” The “baseline” claim of the dossier — that the Trump campaign and Russia participated in a towering election conspiracy — hadn’t yet borne out, conceded Maddow. “But even if that is as yet in itself uncorroborated and undocumented,” she said, “all the supporting details are checking out, even the really outrageous ones. A lot of them are starting to bear out under scrutiny. It seems like a new one each passing day.”
[…]
The release of the Mueller report in April provided a kick in the derriere for backers of the dossier. As Glenn Kessler pointed out in The Post, the central allegation of the dossier — an “extensive conspiracy between campaign team and Kremlin, sanctioned at highest levels and involving Russian diplomatic staff based in the US” as well as an "Agreed exchange of information established in both directions” — found no corroboration from Mueller’s investigation, even though the special counsel’s team was charged with probing just this matter.
Mueller, Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, and everyone who isn’t Trump deranged has blown this dossier to pieces as a work of fiction. Maddow clung to hope, wishing it would be a verifiable document. Nope. If broadcasting untrue things is an infraction in Maddow's world, she was a serial abuser.
Here's Maddow in a nutshell: We can’t broadcast Trump’s speech because televising knowingly untrue things is detrimental to the national discourse, which is exactly what I did regarding the Russian collusion investigation.
You have to laugh at this point.
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