While Trump is busy negotiating trade deals across the world and finally getting China to play ball, the media is reigning destruction on his character once again. You won’t catch any of them coming down with a case of “good will toward men” this Christmas season.
Instead, they have twisted everything we know about the Mueller investigation. If you took their word for it, Trump is minutes away from being impeached and will most assuredly rot in jail for the rest of his life. If you actually read the reports yourself, you’ll learn that the real story is quite different.
The Big News
The media has gone absolutely crazy over the last week. News broke that Michael Cohen plead guilty to a new charge: lying to Congress. According to releases from the Mueller investigation, Cohen violated his oath and intentionally deceived Congress during his testimony. Specifically, he lied about the Trump organization’s business dealings in Russia in 2016. Cohen’s original statement was that Trump abandoned the project in January 2016. New reports suggest that the deal didn’t fully collapse until June of 2016.
That suggests that Trump’s business was still working on a Russian deal during six months of Trump’s presidential campaign. According to the media, this is absolute proof that Trump colluded with Russia to win the election.
Let’s slow those horses for a moment. This is definitely bad news for Michael Cohen. If it can be proven that he lied under oath, he’ll face perjury charges among whatever else Mueller is throwing at him. By association, this is bad for Trump too. It shows that the lawyer he trusted was even more corrupt than we already knew.
What this isn’t, is proof that Trump himself did anything wrong. There are a few points to emphasize in this. First, the deal with Russia had nothing to do with politics or elections. It was real estate. Trump’s company was trying to get permits to build a tower in Russia. Ultimately, they abandoned the plan due to “deal fatigue,” in essence there was too much red tape to get the project going and everyone eventually lost interest in the project.
The second important consideration here is that Trump himself wasn’t working on the deal. He was busy campaigning to become President. His subordinates were the ones contacting and working with people in Russia. Let’s emphasize once more that all of this was legal business. It had nothing to do with elections on any level.
The final point is that despite everything, Cohen has stuck to his original testimony in regards to Trump himself. At no point did Cohen see any evidence that Trump conspired with Russian agents to influence the election. That remains true. Building skyscrapers is not election interference.
The Roger Stone Mess
While the Cohen story was breaking, there was also a new story involving Roger Stone. Anyone who claims they have a clear understanding of Roger Stone’s place in all of this is outright lying. Even Roger Stone isn’t clear how he fits into the big picture.
According to mainstream media, Roger Stone was Trump’s liaison to stay in touch with WikiLeaks. It was through Stone that Trump influenced Julian Assange to release Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager John Podesta’s emails, thus influencing the election. None of this has been proven, but it’s the assertion of mainstream media.
Even if this were 100 percent true, it wouldn’t necessarily constitute anything illegal. It’s certainly a far shake less than what the Clinton campaign did by collaborating with a foreign spy to convince the FBI to illegally investigate a political opponent.
More importantly, there’s no evidence that any of this happened the way the news is saying. All that we know so far is that a series of text messages were released, and they show Democratic agents trying to convince Cohen to stifle the release of Clinton emails. It looks like the left were the ones meddling once again.
No matter how we look at this, the unknowns still outnumber the knowns by a lot. But, until we know better, we have to go by the evidence at hand. None of it points at President Trump.
We now have two separate storylines that point to Democrats trying to use foreign agents to influence the election. We still have nothing to suggest that President Trump operated outside of the law at any point. If anything, Mueller continues to prove that Trump has been the victim of the greatest government conspiracy and corruption in the history of our country. But, you wouldn’t get any of that reading mainstream headlines.
