I was a guest on the Tommy Tucker Show on Louisiana superstation WWL this morning.
We covered a wide range of topics over almost 17 minutes. Thanks to Tommy for giving me the time. 17 minutes in radio world is like a million years in real people time.
We started with the weekend media eruption over Jared Kushner, “Backchannels,” and the Robert Mueller special counsel investigation.
I’ll add some transcription shortly.
“I’m very skeptical about those reports regarding [Jared Kushner], and not just because they’re based on anonymous sources, I mean a lot of things are based on anonymous sources, but just the way they’re phrased, they seem to be phrased in a way to make it seem worse than it is…. “Scrutinized” sounds like they’re suspecting he did something wrong, but that’s not a legal term. “Person of interest” is not a legal term. He has volunteered, this is public, he has volunteered to appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee to testify, he’s volunteered to appear to meet with the FBI, it’s been known for months that he had some sort of meetings or interactions with the Russians and with many others, he was the point person for the Trump transition team relations with foreign governments, so that’s not shocking, so what you did did is you have actually no news about him turned into a 4-5 day news cycle about him….”
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“You have a mainstream media which, if you’ve seen the clips of election night coverage, had never accepted Donald Trump’s victory.”
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“We don’t know how this ultimately plays out. We only know what’s been publicly disclosed. What’s been publicly disclosed so far shows no wrongdoing, no criminality, nothing regarding the election or the transition that would cause legitimate concern.”
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“[Backchannels with foreign governments] is completely normal in a transition, in fact Jared Kushner was the designated person to make that reach out to foreign governments, because you don’t want to be sworn in as president and have had no communications with most important foreign governments, be they friendly or not friendly…. Now it would be inappropriate if it crossed over into conducting diplomacy before you’re sworn in as president, because we only have one president at a time, but there’s no evidence that that happened. There’s no evidence that the so-called backchannel to Russia actually was ever implemented…. There’s just a lot of things floating out there that are phrased in ways to make Trump look bad, but when you actually dig down to it, at least based on what’s been disclosed so far, there’s nothing actually wrong with it. And that’s what the whole media cycle has been. And they roll out these new stories day after day after day.”
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“The Media has done incredible damage to itself. They went into this presidency with historically low ratings of trust in the media. And they are playing out day after day why they don’t deserve to be trusted. And that’s not a good thing in the long run, because one of these days they will actually come up with a legitimate truly scandalous story, and nobody’s going to believe them.”
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“We have to go, in my view, based on the evidence that we have, not on the suspicions. And so far there’s been a lot of innuendo, etc. We don’t really know what the relationship was, but I don’t think there’s any reason to presume that it was unlawful or improper in some way. There’s no evidence of that. So again, where I’ve always come back to on this is not that Trump did nothing wrong, it’s that the burden is on the people making the accusations and innuendo to give us actual facts, give us actual evidence….”
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