Donald Trump has accused a lot of people of committing crimes: President Obama, Hillary Clinton, the FBI, the Department of Justice, Democrats running for offices, Robert Mueller, Mueller’s investigative team, and now The New York Times. At this point, the only law-abiding patriots according to Trump are Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un.
No one understands the inner workings of Trump’s mind better than Fox News. To distract from all the damning news of the Mueller report, falling jobs numbers, failing polls, and a last-minute pullout from conflict in Iran, Trump’s base needs a good conspiracy theory. As usual, Fox News was able to find one.
Somehow, a theory has developed (and Trumpsters are sure to buy into it) that the FBI began their investigation with a discredited dossier that has never been discredited and continued to investigate Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign based on stories “fed” to them by The New York Times. The foreign government officials who reported that Trump’s campaign team was bragging about the hacked Clinton emails, apparently, weren’t the catalyst for an investigation that ended in numerous indictments and prison sentences. Instead, it was a newspaper that had so much influence, it could make up any story about a crime and the entire FBI would base investigations on it.
Nothing in the Mueller report indicates that the stories of Trump’s campaign meeting with Russian government officials, knowing about the plan to hack and release DNC and Clinton campaign emails, or the subsequent investigations into those acts were false. In fact, it confirmed much of the reporting done by legitimate mainstream news outlets. Just as Trump insists that the Mueller report exonerates him, he’s lying about how the investigation began and why it continued. In the age of Trump, lies like this are nothing new.
Twitter certainly wasn’t interested in Trump’s new conspiracy theory. Read some of their comments below:
Featured image via Flickr by Gage Skidmore under a Creative Commons license
