With the Mueller report exonerating US President Donald Trump of colluding with Russia, ‘Resistance’ media lost no time in shifting their angle of attack – it’s now all about ‘obstruction’ and AG William Barr.
After AG Barr went before the press and quoted bits of Mueller’s now-released report, as well as his personal conclusions, panelists on CNN went all-out blaming him for trying to portray Trump as innocent of obstruction of justice. In a packed studio, eight people spent hours bouncing back and forth on a few of the same talking points – mostly attacking Barr’s presentation of Mueller’s release.
Echoing Democratic leaders’ accusations of partisanship, CNN legal analyst Carrie Cordero said Barr “had an opportunity to rise above the politics” and only talk about the dry process of reaching conclusions, “and he blew it.”
They took particular issue with how Barr mentioned Trump’s anger and frustration in the face of attacks by ‘Russiagate’-peddling media (like the CNN). Laura Coates, another legal analyst, went as far as calling it an “Oprah moment”, following it up with an emphatic “you’ve got to be kidding me!”
CNN’s chief legal analyst and a staff writer for the New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin, insisted on Twitter that Trump’s overall frustration with the investigation against him was somehow proof of his guilt.
Mueller’s conclusion that there was no conspiracy between Trump and Russia is no longer a problem, it seems. But Barr repeated that conclusion “over and over and over again, six or seven times, that’s excessive,” says Jake Tapper, whose network has spent the past two years repeating the opposite – over and over and over again.
The host of CNN’s Cuomo Prime Time, Chris Cuomo, took the argument even further, saying that Trump might not have been conspiring with the Russians, but he was still guilty of “collusion.” And it didn’t matter to the show’s anchor that Special Counsel Robert Mueller repeatedly stated that the latter wasn’t a crime.