The Trump team adamantly refuses to give up some of their most precious lies, like that President Donald Trump himself has been cleared of allegations of both collusion with Russia and obstruction of justice. His 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale railed to that effect in an angry statement this Wednesday following an abruptly called press conference from Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who led the Justice Department’s lengthy investigation into the Russia scandal.
Parscale claimed:
‘Special Counsel Mueller’s remarks today confirmed what we already knew. There was no collusion between the Russians and the Trump campaign and there was no case for obstruction. President Trump has been fully and completely exonerated. Mueller said his investigation is over. The case is now closed.’
Besides the part about his investigation being over, that’s quite simply not what Mueller said. Parscale is lying. In reality, Mueller reiterated some of the key conclusions of his team’s final report including that they found a case for obstruction, but they could not pursue it to the point of criminal charges because of standing Justice Department precedent against indicting a sitting president.
As he put it:
‘If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.’
There is no way at all to jump from that statement to the assertion from Parscale, Trump, and others that there’s no case for obstruction against the president.
As former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul put it:
‘Can Trump officials & surrogates please stop insulting our intelligence by claiming Mueller investigation found no evidence of obstruction. We are not idiots.’
Mueller told those listening this Wednesday that the final report from his probe should be considered the substance of any available testimony he’d be giving, and that report outlines the same conclusion that the special counsel shared this week — despite evidence against the president pointing towards criminal activity, they could not pursue a case because of policy, not a lack of guilt.
Still, the Trump team aren’t done with their spin — far from it. In his Wednesday statement, which the president personally signed on to in a sense via a retweet from his personal Twitter account, Parscale reiterated the Trump team’s allegations that they’ve been spied on by the federal government, despite a remaining lack of evidence of any actual wrongdoing on the part of those responsible for the surveillance.
He railed:
‘Now it’s time to get to the origins of the Russia hoax… Anyone who is for transparency, constitutional civil liberties, and the rule of law should want to know why human sources, wiretapping, and unmasking were used to infiltrate a presidential campaign.’
Read:
“Now it’s time to turn to the origins of the Russia hoax and get to the bottom of why the Trump campaign was spied on by the Obama-era DOJ and FBI.”
Our statement on Mueller from @parscale @TeamTrump: pic.twitter.com/x6H3FfNnS2
— Kayleigh McEnany (@kayleighmcenany) May 29, 2019
It’s really not that complicated. As Mueller made abundantly clear at his press conference this week and in the final report from his investigation, the Trump campaign was scrutinized in the face of their very real connections to a very real Russian plot to tilt U.S. elections in their favor, no matter the lack of a criminally prosecutable conspiracy. The president and his associates just keep spinning out of control in their nonsense.
Check out Twitter’s response below…
Featured Image via screenshot
