On Sunday morning, Donald Trump Jr. appeared on the Fox News program Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo. During the unhinged interview, he dished out a volley of utter nonsense, like the claim that there’s “no proof that it was the Russians when it was Donald Trump.” Despite the lack of prosecutable cooperation between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives, those operatives supported the campaign and the Trump team welcomed it. Meanwhile, at another point, Bartiromo herself pushed the lie that recent printing and distribution errors involving mail-in ballots represent some kind of “fraud,” and Trump Jr., of course, eagerly accepted this false premise. However, the Trump team’s consistent claims of some kind of widespread fraud accompanying the usage of mail-in ballots are flatly false.
Trump Jr. and Bartiromo spent some time discussing a recent New York Post story claiming to reveal material from Hunter Biden’s own laptop. This alleged evidence included the detail that Joe Biden had supposedly met with an adviser at the corruption-laced Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings, but there is no apparent independent tangible evidence that proves the legitimacy of these supposed laptop contents, and there is no apparent evidence that Joe Biden ever met with this Burisma adviser. Trump Jr., however, feverishly claimed that the mainstream media is “running cover for what is arguably the greatest corruption scheme in American political history,” which is hyperbolic nonsense, plain and simple.
Before that moment, Jr. ranted:
‘The swamp, social media, mainstream media — they want Biden to win, even though it’s likely that Biden is probably the most compromised person in the history of American politics. We’re two weeks out from an election, and they’re pretending that this is a non-issue… the Bidens are compromised, and the fact that no one’s denying the efficacy of the emails. No one’s denying that they’re actually real. No one’s doing that.’
Watch some of his comments below:
At one point, Trump Jr. insisted that “the one thing they are not saying is that Joe Biden didn’t take these meetings,” but that is literally what they actually are saying. The Biden camp has insisted that the former vice president never met with the Burisma adviser, as alleged by that dubious New York Post story. Trump Jr. delivered a real zinger when he feverishly claimed that “there’s no proof” of Russian disinformation behind the latest Hunter Biden story — but the U.S. federal government has, quite literally, issued sanctions against a Ukrainian legislator named Andrii Derkach, who feds have characterized as a Russian agent and who has been working to spread dirt about the Bidens. Thus, there’s reason for concern.
Trump Jr. also claimed that there’s “no proof that it was the Russians when it was Donald Trump” — which is ridiculous. Has Trump Jr. taken full leave of reality at this point? Federal authorities on multiple levels from the Justice Department to the Senate have concluded that Russia worked to support the Trump campaign, even in the absence of prosecutable conspiracy between the two parties.
Trump Jr. claimed that “the Obama administration” and “the Biden administration” were “working with the highest level of the FBI and the CIA to knowingly peddle the disinformation campaign gathered from what they knew was a former Soviet asset” — but again, this rhetoric is disconnected from reality. There was no high-level government campaign to peddle disinformation targeting the Trumps.
