Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center has aggressively defended Donald Trump against the many indictment he faces, but before it could get around to defending him against his third indictment, it felt the need to complaing that people were likening him to a mob boss. Peter Kotara groused in a July 26 post:
On Wednesday’s Morning Joe, race-baiting Reverend Al Sharpton came up with an excessively belligerent and hateful reason for why Democrat prosecutions of former President Donald Trump were not affecting his support among voters in the Republican primary.
Sharpton argued that the reason why all these indictments brought by Trump’s political enemies right before the election, was in fact because Trump appealed to the Republican electorate who just hated blacks, women, and gays, and wanted to oppress them.
[...]
He added that Trump was a “crime boss.” Sharpton argued that “It was Trump that had a crime attorney, Roy Cohen [sic], who represented outright mafia chiefs. That was Donald Trump's lawyer. I mean if anyone was a crime boss and is a crime boss, it would be Donald Trump. And if you think it's an overstatement, get the calendar of court dates he has coming up the rest of the year.”
It should be noted that none of the Trump indictments were about mafia activities or organized crime, and hiring a very well-known attorney that happened to represent mafia members in the past does not prove that Trump was a mafia member.
Yes, Kotara is reduced to insisting that Trump can't possibly be a mob boss because he hasn't been specifically charged with being one. And doesn't the hiring of a mob attorney like Roy Cohn say volumes about the company you keep, whether or not you're actually involved in the mob?
Mark Finkelstein similarly complained in a July 28 post:
It's easy for the pro-Biden networks to promote Jack Smith's indictments with maximum drama. On Friday's Morning Joe, NBC News justice correspondent Ken Dilanian is bringing all the doom-and-gloom language he brought to the Mueller probe of Russian collusion with Trump.
Speaking of the new charges against Trump, that he attempted to have surveillance video at Mar-a-Lago deleted, Dilanian really built this up as a criminal conspiracy:
"These allegations rival anything that Richard Nixon was accused of. These are two additional counts of obstruction of justice. . . This indictment reads like a Mafia case."As you'll see in the video, Dilanian appeared to be virtually at a loss for words as he declared the situation "mind-boggling."
Willie Geist, hosting today's show, agreed with Dilanian, saying:
"It really is astonishing, Jonathan Lemire. It has to be said, reading through this new indictment, it reads like something straight out of the Gambino crime family."
Finkelstein offered nothing but whataboutism in response:
Given his track record on the truth, Dilanian's declarations might be taken with a grain of salt. Back in 2020, NewsBusters caught Dilanian claiming that the Hunter Biden laptop story sounded "really fishy " He suggested that it was, in fact, a Russian "intelligence operation." Whoops!
PS: If Trump sounds like a Mafia boss, what does Joe '10% for the Big Guy' Biden sound like—Cosa Nostra Ken, complete with Dr. Jill Barbie?
Finkelstein didn't mention that, as we've previously noted, questions about Hunter's laptop were reasonable given that they came from the wildly biased pro-Trump right-wing rag that his the New York Post , and the Post could have avoided such questions had they provided independent verification of the laptop that would have address skepticism about it.
The MRC reguarly gets annoyed when it's pointed out that Trump acts and speaks not unlike a mobster -- something many others have also pointed out.
