For some reason, Donald Trump Jr. keeps pushing himself into the national political conversation as if he has any authority to be talking about nationally pressing issues outside a tenuous association to the White House via his last name. This Friday, he jumped on the bandwagon of Trump team members insisting that a bombshell report Buzzfeed dropped this week accusing the president of directing Michael Cohen to commit perjury is baseless and figures into a broader pattern of supposed fake news.
Responding to conservative agitator Jack Posobiec noting that the original story relies on sources, Trump Jr. ranted:
‘Here we go again… another CNN/Buzzfeed “bombshell” with no evidence. The usual clickbait BS… and when it fails as all the others have there will be ZERO coverage. Textbook
#fakenews’
Here we go again… another CNN/Buzzfeed “bombshell” with no evidence. The usual clickbait BS… and when it fails as all the others have there will be ZERO coverage. Textbook #fakenews https://t.co/VNHN9ndz36
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) January 18, 2019
It’s ironic that the Trump team keeps claiming that there’s no evidence backing up the Buzzfeed story… without any apparent evidence to back themselves up. They’re just throwing the claim out there and hoping it’ll stick and riding on the apparent hope that their most dedicated followers won’t examine what they’re being fed too closely.
The fact that the reporters behind the Buzzfeed story in question relied on sources and not their own personal experience does not discredit the account, although this isn’t even the first time the Trump team has raised a similar claim. President Donald Trump himself has claimed — without evidence! — that reporters going around touting tales based on anonymous sources have no evidence and just made the sources up. At one point, he issued such a claim about a story that turned out to have emanated from an off-the-record press briefing his own administration offered about the then-ongoing negotiations over a Trump summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
He and others like Trump Jr. have raised a similar claim over the Russia scandal numerous times. Still, Trump Jr. offers no immediate evidence for the “all the other” Trump/Russia stories he claims have failed. Deputy White House press secretary Hogan Gidley pointed to Buzzfeed’s publication of the infamous Steele dossier outlining allegations of Trump/Russia collusion as evidence the publication supposedly isn’t to be trusted — but that dossier has not been entirely disproved. Some details have been confirmed — like that former Trump adviser Carter Page met with high ranking officials at Russia’s state owned energy company Rosneft during a July 2016 trip he took to Moscow. Other high profile allegations haven’t been publicly confirmed per se although there’s been rumored to be confirmation out there over points like former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s alleged trip to Prague to coordinate the Trump team’s cooperation with the Kremlin.
To begin with, Buzzfeed never said those allegations were all accurate. However, the allegations themselves are all very real and serious, and that doesn’t dissipate just because someone with the last name Trump stands in front of a mirror and says fake news 3 — or 300 — times.
President Trump meanwhile has focused on Cohen’s supposed credibility issues in his own response — although Cohen isn’t even the source for the latest high profile Buzzfeed story and federal authorities apparently have evidence backing it up.
Check out Twitter’s response below…
Featured Image via YouTube screenshot
