Topic: CNSNews.com
Lots of questions were raised about President Trump's appointment of Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general. But despite being a self-proclaimed "news" organization, CNSNews.com wasn't going to raise them -- to the contrary, its goal was to defend Whitaker's appointment and his conservative bona fides, particularly in opposition to Robert Mueller's Trump-Russia investigation.
- A Nov. 7 article by managing editor Michael W. Chapman highlighted how Whitaker has "stressed that the Special Counsel was limited to investigating 'matters that involved any potential links to and coordination between two entities -- the Trump campaign and the Russian government,' and Trump family finances are outside that instruction."
- On Nov. 12, Melanie Arter touted how Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said that Whitaker was "appropriately appointed legally" and does not need to recuse himself from the Mueller probe despite being highly critical of it because "you don't recuse somebody because they have opinions different than the people they are overseeing."
- Chapman returned to gush that Whitaker once made the conservatively correct statement that "judges at the federal level, especially the U.S. Supreme Court, should have 'a biblical view of justice' and a proper understanding of 'natural law and natural rights.'" Chapman failed to note Whitaker's implication that only Christians should be judges and Jews, Muslims and atheists should not be.
- The next day, he cheered that Whitaker "said in a 2016 interview that there is enough evidence 'in the public domain' to warrant the appointment of a 'special prosecutor' to investigate the Clinton Foundation."
- Arter called on former Attorney General Michael Mukasey to claim that Trump has the right to appoint who he wants as the interim attorney general 'within certain limits.'"
CNS did note some of the controversy around Whitaker's appointment and his dubious past, but framed it as partisan criticsm rather than legitimate concern by having the criticism come out of the mouths of Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi.
So we're not going to see a lot of in-depth reporting on the shady wingnut-welfare nonprofit he ran (CNS published a 2017 article highlighting a statement Whitaker made as head of that nonprofit) or his involvement in and even more shady patent-promotion company. That would hurt the narrative, after all.
