Journalist Matt Taibbi told Hill.TV’s “Rising” on Wednesday that President Trump’s unexpected victory in 2016 led various media figures to argue his campaign had colluded with Russia during the election.
“When he won the election, there was a lot of shock and disbelief in the press community that I think was maybe misplaced,” Taibbi, a Rolling Stone contributor, told co-hosts Krystal Ball and Buck Sexton. “I think maybe if we had been paying attention correctly all along we would have seen this more as like the logical result of a long period of discontent that had been growing for quite some time, dating back probably two election cycles.”
“Instead, we sort of jumped immediately on this storyline that the election results were illegitimate and that Trump was the agent of a foreign power who would fix the vote,” he added. “I understand that there were reasons for people to think that, but I think that was the psychological reason behind a lot of what happened.”
Attorney General William Barr released his summary of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, which found no evidence of coordination or conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Moscow.
Many of Trump’s critics in the media, including legal experts, have been on the defensive following Barr’s summary of Mueller’s findings.
Mueller “ultimately determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment” regarding whether Trump attempted to obstruct the probe itself, according to Barr’s summary. Barr wrote that he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein determined that the evidence was “not sufficient” to establish obstruction of justice.
— Julia Manchester
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