Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Nicholas Fondacaro and Curtis Houck did their best to play Hillary whataboutism in trying to deflect from President Trump's admission he'd take opposition research from foreign powers in a June 13 post:
President Trump made more headlines Wednesday night after he told ABC chief anchor George Stephanopoulos that he would be fine with taking “oppo research” on his 2020 opponent from foreign countries. This comment drew criticism. But during their almost two hours and 30 minutes of prime time coverage, or hair-on-fire panic, neither CNN nor MSNBC cared to mention that that’s exactly what the Clinton campaign did in 2016 with the now-infamous dossier.
[...]
While these networks spent all this time railing against President Trump, they failed to decry the Clinton campaign’s use of former British spy Christopher Steele to obtain dirt on Trump from Russian sources.
Sorry, dudes, but there's no actual equivalence between the two. The Washington Post explained:
Steele was hired by Fusion GPS to see what links might exist between Trump and Russian actors. Those connections, built during his service for the British government, were why he was valuable to Fusion GPS. It’s akin to a campaign looking to investigate an opponent’s history of real estate deals in Mexico: Hiring a Mexican firm that’s familiar with the available records would be perfectly legal, if the firm were paid with legally raised campaign contributions.
By contrast, these foreign countries would be coming to Trump unsolicitied and would presumably want something in return. Or, as Wonkette further explained:
Paying Fusion GPS -- which it should be noted again is an American company -- and therefore indirectly paying Chris Steele? Legal, because money is going out. Taking things of value from foreigns -- not just our sworn enemies, it's just that Trump likes to hang with America's sworn enemies, because let's be honest the president of the United States is America's sworn enemy? ILLEGAL. And what Russia provided Trump, which Junior clearly thought he was going to get from the Trump Tower treason meeting, but ended up coming through WikiLeaks releases, was stolen goods.
The only way it could possibly be the same is if Hillary Clinton or the Democrats had hired foreign nationals to commit crimes. You know, like, say, for instance, hacking into their computers to steal their emails. Like Russia did for Trump.
We know Fondacaro and Houck have to forward a pro-Trump agenda as part of their job, but they don't get to lie, no matter how many times theyhave heard their fellow conservatives say the same thing. Isn't is their job to, you know, research things before publishing them?
