Give Joe Scarborough credit. Just when we were getting bored with all the Trump/Nazi analogies, Joe has come up with a new one. On today’s Morning Joe, Scarborough compared Trump press secretary Sean Spicer to an old Soviet spokesman and propagandist.
Scarborough’s beef was that Spicer had supposedly said that the meeting of Trump campaign people including Donald, Jr. and the Russians was “just about adoptions.” Joe called that a “lie.”
But have a look at the screenshot below, showing what Spicer actually said.
Spicer began by saying that it’s common “for people who are given information during the heat of a campaign to ask what that is.” In other words, when the Russian said she had oppo on Hillary, the Trump campaign was interested. That was their motivation for taking the meeting. When, as per the Trump admin, it turned out that the Russian had no oppo to offer and only wanted to discuss adoption and the Magnitsky Act, the meeting soon ended.
The wisdom of taking the meeting at all can be debated. But it is absurd for Scarborough to assert that Spicer claimed that the only subject of the meeting was adoptions. So who’s the propagandist now?
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: At yesterday’s off-camera White House press briefing, Sean Spicer would not say who was right, and reverted to the administration’s original defense of the meeting.SEAN SPICER: I’m not going to get into the specifics of this, but I will say that it is quite often for people who are given information during the heat of a campaign to ask what that is. That’s what simply he did. The President’s made this clear through his tweet and there was nothing that as far as we know that would lead anyone to believe that there was anything except for a discussion about adoption and the Magnitsky Act.JOE SCARBOROUGH: I mean, I’m glad that the topic’s to Russia because it actually reminds me, Sean Spicer yesterday, it reminds me, and I know you’ll remember, what we used to hear from the old Soviet Union spokespeople. They would come out and say things that had already been disproven, that the whole world knew had been disproven.And when Sean Spicer comes out yesterday and says it’s just about adoptions, that, I mean, that lie, which the President signed off on on Air Force One was proven to be a falsehood over a week ago and everyone in Washington, everyone in America knows it. And yet like an old Soviet propagandist, you have White House people going out and actually quoting something that was proven to be a falsehood eight, nine, ten days ago.
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