A series of bias allegations and media errors related to the Russia probe this week offered President Trump’s allies the opportunity to push back on a controversy that has begun to ensnare members of the president’s inner circle.
White House officials received a gift from special counsel Robert Mueller’s team this week in the form of revelations about questionable behavior exhibited by an investigator and an attorney attached to the Russia probe.
A former member of Mueller’s outfit, investigator Peter Strzok, received a demotion this summer after he allegedly sent anti-Trump, pro-Hillary Clinton text messages to his mistress, who was also an FBI employee. Strzok played a prominent role in the bureau’s Clinton email investigation before he joined Mueller’s team, multiple outlets reported this week.
A prosecutor presently on Mueller’s legal team sent an email to former acting Attorney General Sally Yates in late January praising her decision to defy Trump’s travel ban executive order, according to documents released to conservative group Judicial Watch this week.
Andrew Weissmann, the attorney, also attended Clinton’s election-night party in New York last year, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
And three separate reporting blunders involving the Russia investigation in the span of just one week dealt a blow to the media’s credibility at an opportune moment for Trump, who has long decried the investigation as the product of “fake news.”
But, the White House remained largely silent on the string of developments, leaving its allies and supporters to begin prosecuting the case against Mueller’s investigation.
“Outside of tweets and a comment here and there, in most cases, the push back won’t come with the White House’s fingerprints directly on it,” said Ford O’Connell, a Republican strategist.
“It’s one of these things where it’s tough, because you don’t know what the scope of the entire probe is and tomorrow could be something totally new, but you do have to keep a narrative going, to be distrustful of what you hear in terms of a lot of news coverage of it.”
O’Connell said allies of the president appear to have borrowed a page from “Bill Clinton’s handbook,” referring to the former president’s efforts to delegitimize the special counsel who investigated his own activities in the 1990s. Clinton and his wife worked to paint the special counsel, Kenneth Starr, as an element of the “vast right-wing conspiracy” they believed Republicans created to destroy the Clinton presidency.
Just 30 percent of Americans think the Trump campaign “definitely” engaged in inappropriate contacts with Russians during the presidential race, according to a survey conducted last week by the Pew Research Center.
But, confidence in Mueller’s team varied sharply between Republicans and Democrats, suggesting the doubts about his credibility remain confined to people predisposed to defend the president. While 37 percent of Democrats say they are “very confident” that Mueller will conduct a fair investigation, only 14 percent of Republicans said the same.
The perception that partisan politics has driven the Russia controversy also breaks down along party lines, although nearly half of all voters may suspect partisanship underpins the investigation.
A CBS News poll conducted earlier this month found 48 percent of Americans think the Mueller probe is “politically motivated,” while 46 percent of Americans think it “justified.”
The president’s supporters in the media seized on the news this week that members of Mueller’s team may have harbored animus toward Trump.
Gregg Jarrett, a Fox News legal analyst with a history of defending Trump on-air, said Wednesday the latest developments in the Mueller investigation prove Trump has become the victim of a “shadow government” plot to destroy him.
“I think we now know that the Mueller investigation is illegitimate and corrupt,” Jarrett told Fox’s Sean Hannity. “And Mueller has been using the FBI as a political weapon. And the FBI has become America’s secret police. Secret surveillance, wiretapping, intimidation, harassment, and threats. It’s like the old KGB that comes for you in the dark of the night banging through your door.”
Newt Gingrich, the former GOP House speaker and staunch Trump backer, said news of the alleged bias has revealed the FBI to be “profoundly dishonest” and “corrupt.”
Other high-profile Trump supporters on the network have also amplified doubts about Mueller’s objectivity.
But some nonpartisan legal experts have noted the problematic questions raised by the bias allegations.
Kendra Arnold, an attorney and the executive director for the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, said the allegations against Stzrok and Weissmann have raised legitimate criticism.
“You can tell that there is a legitimate issue here because action was taken and people were moved off the case. That means that it’s just not on the surface, that there really is something there to warrant government action,” Arnold said.
“We don’t expect government employees not to have political positions or opinions or be normal human beings,” she added. “If they have strong opinions as to a politician and they’re investigating it, it is an issue.”
Beyond the risk that partisans could manipulate news of potential bias to wage a political fight in defense of the president, Arnold said a judge could potentially allow the bias allegations to be heard in court if attorneys for those indicted by the special counsel — such as Paul Manafort and Rick Gates — try to raise the issue in defense of their clients.
“That is a valid line of questioning to go down, to see if that influenced the investigation,” Arnold said.
The media’s botched treatment of developments in the Russia probe this week may not have legal implications, but they could undermine confidence in future coverage of the scandal.
ABC News’ Brian Ross faces a month-long suspension after he erroneously reported late last week Trump had asked his former national security adviser, Mike Flynn, to contact the Russians during the 2016 race. The network had to run a high-profile correction noting Trump made the request during the transition, when establishing contact with foreign governments is routine.
Days later, Bloomberg was forced to correct a story claiming Mueller had sent a subpoena to Deutsche Bank for the financial records of Trump and his family, a report the president’s lawyer called “false.”
And on Friday, CNN issued a massive correction to a story that claimed Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, had received an email on Sept. 4 of last year that may have alerted him in advance to WikiLeaks’ impending publication of stolen emails. Trump Jr. actually received the email on Sept. 14, the Washington Post and others later revealed, meaning the premise of CNN’s story — which the network touted all morning as bombshell evidence that the Trump campaign may have coordinated with WikiLeaks — was false.
The media mistakes offered Trump fresh fodder to wage war against his favorite foe, the “fake news.”
