rachel-maddow Archives - openpolitics.com

Ed Meese an unlikely recipient of honor …except by TrumpEd Meese an unlikely recipient of honor …except by Trump

Rachel Maddow reviews the checkered history of former Attorney General Ed Meese, whose anti-obscenity crusade made receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Donald Trump that much more ironic.

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Mitch McConnell At Nexus Of Increased Russian Leverage On U.S.

Mitch McConnell dropped sanctions on Oleg Deripaska after they offered to investion over $1 billion in an aluminum plant in Kentucky.

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Why do people have such divergent perspectives on the Mueller Report, ranging from Trump being completely exonerated to Trump being guilty of obstruction of justice and impeachable?

Bob Sacamano, studied Useless Information. at School of Hard Knocks

Answered Fri

I believe that I have an example that may answer this. After Barr released the redacted Mueller report, I watched the first half of the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC and later the first half of the Hannity show on Fox.

Maddow is biased, I have no disagreement about that but the coverage she gave was completely different from Hannity. Maddow took direct quotes from the report and discussed it with her guests. She easily discussed over ten direct quotes from the report in less than half an hour. She may have taken some quotes out of context, I have not read the report yet. Obviously she also chose quotes that would reinforce her narrative. Just remember, I am not claiming that Maddow is not biased.

Hannity spent the vast majority of the first half of his show ranting about Obama, Mueller, Hillary, Loretta Lynch, the deep state, Democrats in general, etc. After about twenty minutes Hannity finally took a direct quote from the report. A quote from Trump. Hannity then went back to ranting about all the people previously mentioned. Maybe he took more direct quotes later, I can only watch so much Hannity before I vomit.

So, Hannity claims that Trump is exonerated but he cited nothing from the report to back this up. Maddow tried to back up everything she said with a direct quote from the report. The reason why people have different perspectives is because of where they get their news. Liberals may watch biased news but at least they try to back it up with facts. Many conservatives get their news from propagandists. Sadly it appears as if many conservatives don’t know propaganda when they see it.

I should probably add this. In the thirty minutes I watched, Maddow asked her viewers to read the Mueller report for themselves several times. Hannity did not ask his viewers to read the Mueller report once in the thirty minutes I watched.

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Donald Trump Jr. Seems Relevant To Robert Mueller Paths Of Inquiry | Rachel Maddow | MSNBC

Rachel Maddow points out the frequency with which Donald Trump Jr.’s name seems to come up in discussions of Wikileaks contacts and potential lies to Congress, both of which appear to be topics of prosecutorial interest by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

19:58

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‘Bad Behavior By People In High Office’: Rachel Maddow On The Lessons Of Spiro Agnew

There are countless presidential scandals in U.S. history, but very few of them have resulted in resignation or impeachment — which is precisely why MSNBC host Rachel Maddow was drawn to the story of Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon’s first vice president, who resigned in 1973.

Maddow notes there are many misconceptions concerning the former vice president — including the notion that his “big sin” centered on taxes.

“When I tried to sort of thumbnail in my mind what happened in the Agnew resignation, everything I thought about it was wrong,” she says. “I had assumed that it was a Watergate-adjacent scandal, that the FBI was looking into Watergate-related crimes and they stumbled upon something in Spiro Agnew’s taxes. … All of those things were completely wrong.”

Maddow and her former producer Mike Yarvitz created the podcast Bag Man to revisit Agnew’s story. Though his resignation was officially linked to tax evasion, they say that Agnew had engaged in bribery that dated to the early 1960s, when, as Baltimore County executive, he demanded kickbacks in exchange for local engineering or architecture contracts. He continued the practice even after being elected governor of Maryland in 1967 and then vice president in 1969.

“He … started that scheme in local politics and then he carried it right into the White House,” Yarvitz says. “The men who were sort of streaming into his office at the White House were paying him money for contracts they had gotten in Maryland, and in some cases, he was trying to influence the awarding of federal contracts.”

After the Justice Department began looking into Agnew’s dealings, the vice president tried to pressure the U.S. attorney in charge of the case to halt the investigation — a response Maddow likens to the current administration’s reaction to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible ties to the Trump campaign.

“The parallels with what was going on in the Nixon and Agnew administration 45 years ago to the efforts by the Trump administration right now … is uncanny,” Maddow says. “The Agnew story is really helpful to understanding the way the system works when it confronts bad behavior by people in high office. We are capable of dealing with that as a country in a way that makes us proud of the people who are in public office who are dealing with it.”

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Botched Redactions Expose New Details Of Mueller’s Paul Manafort Case | Rachel Maddow | MSNBC

Rachel Maddow reports on an avalanche of legal news including details in the Paul Manafort case exposed by a lawyer’s poor redactions, an intriguing new indictment, and another development in the mystery Mueller case.

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Unlike Richard Nixon, Donald Trump Misconduct Piling Up In Full Public View | Rachel Maddow | MSNBC

Rachel Maddow reviews the many ways that Americans have witnessed Donald Trump attempt to quash or otherwise undercut the special counsel investigation into his 2016 presidential campaign, unlike Richard Nixon, the full record of whose misdeeds were not publicly known until after his scandal had run its course.

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