Re: Looks like Rachel Maddow got his ass handed to her
Posted by:
for the perpetually stupid
()
Date: May 01, 2019 11:40AM
Counter-intelligence probe Wrote:
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> So weak. COLLUSION is a Trump word, and it has
> been from the beginning. Words like 'asset,'
> 'compromat,' and 'conspiracy' have been more what
> the loyal opposition has been focused on.
How did the word “collusion” get introduced into the public lexicon? And who is initially responsible for introducing it? The answer, it turns out, goes back to July of 2016 at the Democratic National Convention.
On July 22, 2016, Wikileaks released more than 19,000 emails from top members of the Democratic National Committee. Two days after the release, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager Robby Mook told CNN that, according to “experts,” Russian state actors had stolen the emails from the DNC and were releasing them through Wikileaks “for the purpose of actually helping Donald Trump.”
Mook did not use the word “collusion,” but the press, in reporting his comments, did. Within the hour, in an article timestamped at 9:55 a.m., the Washington Examiner reported that Paul Manafort and Donald Trump Jr, had responded to Mook’s allegations and “vigorously denied any kind of collusion between Trump Sr. and the Russian president.” (To be clear, Manafort denied “any ties” between Putin and the Trump campaign, and Donald Trump Jr. criticized Mook for “lie after lie.” Neither one of them mentioned “collusion.”) Ninety minutes later, at 11:27 a.m., ABC News repeated what it termed Mook’s “allegation of collusion between the campaign and Russia.” And three hours later, at approximately 12:35 p.m., Bernie Sanders’s campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, told CNN’s Jake Tapper, “If there was some kind of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence or Russian hackers, that clearly has to be dealt with.”
From there it was off to the races. Over the next two weeks, the word “collusion” was used hundreds of times by politicians like Martin O’Malley and media personalities such as Trevor Noah.
The term caught on, I think, because it captured the general suspicion that the campaign was somehow in on the hack or knowingly benefiting from it while carefully eliding the fact that no tangible evidence had yet emerged tying the Trump campaign to the Kremlin. (Remember that news of the Trump Tower meeting and other contacts between the campaign and Russian actors had not yet become public.)
After this initial spurt, the collusion frenzy tapered off. Through August and September the word appeared only sporadically in the press, as other stories edged out the Trump-Russia narrative for dominance in the campaign. But when Wikileaks published more than 50,000 emails from Clinton’s campaign chairman in October of 2016, the term had a renaissance of sorts.
The popularity of the term continued to wax and wane throughout the final months of 2016. When a big story would break about Trump, the campaign, or Clinton’s emails, the word “collusion” would appear in headlines. Not every story described the relationship as collusion. Some referred to it as “ties” with Russia. Others questioned whether Trump was “coordinating” with Putin. Collusion had not yet become the de facto term to describe the Russia connection. But it was very much in the mix.