By
Jennifer Rubin
Opinion writer
Dec. 9, 2019 at 10:15 a.m. CST
The worst of the Republican conspiratorialists — and sadly, that includes the president — say Ukraine interfered with the 2016 presidential election because of something involving the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike. (The fact is CrowdStrike was founded by a U.S. citizen, not a Ukrainian, and there’s no Democratic National Committee server in Ukraine.) This was the theory President Trump specifically raised in his July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. It is bonkers.
The Post reported: “It is based on virtually no evidence, yet it emerged from the president’s mouth during a phone conversation with his Ukrainian counterpart … Thomas P. Bossert, who served as Trump’s first homeland security adviser, said Sept. 29 that the president has been repeatedly told that the story has been ‘completely debunked,’ yet Trump continues to embrace it.”
When Republicans raise this conspiracy, they should be called out immediately. This is not an opinion or speculation. It is a lie. Republicans who know better should ask why they feel comfortable supporting a president who persists in holding fast to a false conspiracy theory. Should such a person be president?
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Cleverer Republicans say Ukraine interfered because a handful of Ukrainian officials wrote public op-eds opposing Trump’s pro-Russian propaganda about Ukrainians wanting to be part of Russia. This is what Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) attempted to do on Sunday’s “Meet the Press” when host Chuck Todd exposed what Cruz was up to:
CHUCK TODD:
Do you believe Ukraine meddled in the American election in 2016?
SEN. TED CRUZ:
I do. And I think there's considerable evidence of that.
CHUCK TODD:
You do? You do?
SEN. TED CRUZ:
Yes and Chuck let me say --
CHUCK TODD:
Look this is — Senator, this sort of strikes me as odd. Because you went through a primary campaign with this president. He launched a birtherism campaign against you. He went after your faith. He threatened to, quote, “spill the beans,” about your wife about something. He pushed a National Enquirer, story, which we now know he had a real relationship with the editors of the National Enquirer —
SEN. TED CRUZ:
And Chuck, I appreciate you dragging up all that garbage. That's very kind of you, go ahead.
CHUCK TODD:
No, but Senator is it — let me ask you this. Is it not possible that this president is capable of creating a false narrative about somebody, in order to help him, politically?
SEN. TED CRUZ:
Except that’s not what happened. The president released the transcript of the phone call. You can read what was said on the phone call. And let me point out —
CHUCK TODD:
Yeah and the Bidens. And you, yourself, thought the Biden part was troubling.
SEN. TED CRUZ:
Chuck, Chuck, let me point out a game that the media is playing. You know, a question that you’ve asked a number of people is you’ve said to senators, sort of aghast, “Do you believe that Ukraine, and not Russia, interfered in the election?” Now, that, that, in a court of law, would be struck as a misleading question. Of course Russia interfered in our election. Nobody looking at the evidence disputes that. What the media is pretending is —
CHUCK TODD:
But the President of the United States does.
SEN. TED CRUZ:
Look, on the evidence, Russia clearly interfered in our election. But here’s the game the media is playing. Because Russia interfered, the media pretends nobody else did. Ukraine blatantly interfered in our election. The sitting ambassador from Ukraine wrote an op-ed blasting Donald Trump —
Query why Cruz supports a president who denies reality in a way so damaging to the security of Western democracies. (In the Cold War, Cruz would have called someone of this ilk a “useful idiot.”) Todd responded to the “op-ed is interference” hooey with assistance from The Post’s Robert Costa:
CHUCK TODD:
They wrote an op-ed. That is the difference -- what you’re saying is, you’re saying a pickpocket, which essentially is a Hill op-ed, compared to Bernie Madoff and Vladimir Putin. You’re trying to make — you’re trying to equal — make them both seem equal. I don’t understand that. . . .
Later, The Post’s Robert Costa and Todd explained what was going on:
ROBERT COSTA:
[Rudolph Giuliani’s] been over in Ukraine. And he’s sending a signal to Democrats. And Republicans on Capitol Hill, some of them are wary, but they’re only being wary privately. They think the president is going to conduct political war in the coming five to ten weeks making his own case on Ukraine and corruption. We’ve heard echoes of it in Senator Cruz’s interview with you. I did a front-page story for The Post this week about how the GOP is embracing the idea of Ukrainian interference despite testimony from U.S. officials, that counters that entirely.
CHUCK TODD:
By the way, testimony that Senator Ted Cruz elicited this week for what it's worth.
ROBERT COSTA:
You nailed it, Chuck. They’re equating op-ed articles and political opinions with interference.
In short, Republicans such as Cruz are deliberately misleading their base and in the process helping Vladimir Putin spread anti-Ukrainian propaganda. “Interference” in the 2016 election context is not writing something in a newspaper and attaching one’s name to it. If so, then every foreign politician who criticizes a sitting U.S. president “interferes” in an election. That’s daft. (Furthermore, it is exactly what Trump does with Brexit and elections in France, Israel and elsewhere. It may be unseemly, but it is not illegal election interference.)
AD
Russia sent operatives to create divisive events, unleashed ads and bots posing as Americans to try to influence our voters, hacked the DNC server and strategically leaked emails via WikiLeaks — all to help Trump. It was illegal, and hence Russians and Russian companies were indicted for this conduct. Ukraine did none of this.
It is a favorite tactic of authoritarians to distort language, to create doubt and fudge up facts so as to raise doubts about objective reality and tire its critics. When you do not know what to believe, an autocrat can create his own reality built on lies. That is what the Republican Party, the weak-on-Putin party, does these days. It is dishonest, and, yes, un-American.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/12/09/how-expose-republicans-lies/
Jennifer Rubin
Opinion writer
Dec. 9, 2019 at 10:15 a.m. CST
The worst of the Republican conspiratorialists — and sadly, that includes the president — say Ukraine interfered with the 2016 presidential election because of something involving the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike. (The fact is CrowdStrike was founded by a U.S. citizen, not a Ukrainian, and there’s no Democratic National Committee server in Ukraine.) This was the theory President Trump specifically raised in his July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. It is bonkers.
The Post reported: “It is based on virtually no evidence, yet it emerged from the president’s mouth during a phone conversation with his Ukrainian counterpart … Thomas P. Bossert, who served as Trump’s first homeland security adviser, said Sept. 29 that the president has been repeatedly told that the story has been ‘completely debunked,’ yet Trump continues to embrace it.”
When Republicans raise this conspiracy, they should be called out immediately. This is not an opinion or speculation. It is a lie. Republicans who know better should ask why they feel comfortable supporting a president who persists in holding fast to a false conspiracy theory. Should such a person be president?
AD
ADVERTISING
Cleverer Republicans say Ukraine interfered because a handful of Ukrainian officials wrote public op-eds opposing Trump’s pro-Russian propaganda about Ukrainians wanting to be part of Russia. This is what Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) attempted to do on Sunday’s “Meet the Press” when host Chuck Todd exposed what Cruz was up to:
CHUCK TODD:
Do you believe Ukraine meddled in the American election in 2016?
SEN. TED CRUZ:
I do. And I think there's considerable evidence of that.
CHUCK TODD:
You do? You do?
SEN. TED CRUZ:
Yes and Chuck let me say --
CHUCK TODD:
Look this is — Senator, this sort of strikes me as odd. Because you went through a primary campaign with this president. He launched a birtherism campaign against you. He went after your faith. He threatened to, quote, “spill the beans,” about your wife about something. He pushed a National Enquirer, story, which we now know he had a real relationship with the editors of the National Enquirer —
SEN. TED CRUZ:
And Chuck, I appreciate you dragging up all that garbage. That's very kind of you, go ahead.
CHUCK TODD:
No, but Senator is it — let me ask you this. Is it not possible that this president is capable of creating a false narrative about somebody, in order to help him, politically?
SEN. TED CRUZ:
Except that’s not what happened. The president released the transcript of the phone call. You can read what was said on the phone call. And let me point out —
CHUCK TODD:
Yeah and the Bidens. And you, yourself, thought the Biden part was troubling.
SEN. TED CRUZ:
Chuck, Chuck, let me point out a game that the media is playing. You know, a question that you’ve asked a number of people is you’ve said to senators, sort of aghast, “Do you believe that Ukraine, and not Russia, interfered in the election?” Now, that, that, in a court of law, would be struck as a misleading question. Of course Russia interfered in our election. Nobody looking at the evidence disputes that. What the media is pretending is —
CHUCK TODD:
But the President of the United States does.
SEN. TED CRUZ:
Look, on the evidence, Russia clearly interfered in our election. But here’s the game the media is playing. Because Russia interfered, the media pretends nobody else did. Ukraine blatantly interfered in our election. The sitting ambassador from Ukraine wrote an op-ed blasting Donald Trump —
Query why Cruz supports a president who denies reality in a way so damaging to the security of Western democracies. (In the Cold War, Cruz would have called someone of this ilk a “useful idiot.”) Todd responded to the “op-ed is interference” hooey with assistance from The Post’s Robert Costa:
CHUCK TODD:
They wrote an op-ed. That is the difference -- what you’re saying is, you’re saying a pickpocket, which essentially is a Hill op-ed, compared to Bernie Madoff and Vladimir Putin. You’re trying to make — you’re trying to equal — make them both seem equal. I don’t understand that. . . .
Later, The Post’s Robert Costa and Todd explained what was going on:
ROBERT COSTA:
[Rudolph Giuliani’s] been over in Ukraine. And he’s sending a signal to Democrats. And Republicans on Capitol Hill, some of them are wary, but they’re only being wary privately. They think the president is going to conduct political war in the coming five to ten weeks making his own case on Ukraine and corruption. We’ve heard echoes of it in Senator Cruz’s interview with you. I did a front-page story for The Post this week about how the GOP is embracing the idea of Ukrainian interference despite testimony from U.S. officials, that counters that entirely.
CHUCK TODD:
By the way, testimony that Senator Ted Cruz elicited this week for what it's worth.
ROBERT COSTA:
You nailed it, Chuck. They’re equating op-ed articles and political opinions with interference.
In short, Republicans such as Cruz are deliberately misleading their base and in the process helping Vladimir Putin spread anti-Ukrainian propaganda. “Interference” in the 2016 election context is not writing something in a newspaper and attaching one’s name to it. If so, then every foreign politician who criticizes a sitting U.S. president “interferes” in an election. That’s daft. (Furthermore, it is exactly what Trump does with Brexit and elections in France, Israel and elsewhere. It may be unseemly, but it is not illegal election interference.)
AD
Russia sent operatives to create divisive events, unleashed ads and bots posing as Americans to try to influence our voters, hacked the DNC server and strategically leaked emails via WikiLeaks — all to help Trump. It was illegal, and hence Russians and Russian companies were indicted for this conduct. Ukraine did none of this.
It is a favorite tactic of authoritarians to distort language, to create doubt and fudge up facts so as to raise doubts about objective reality and tire its critics. When you do not know what to believe, an autocrat can create his own reality built on lies. That is what the Republican Party, the weak-on-Putin party, does these days. It is dishonest, and, yes, un-American.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/12/09/how-expose-republicans-lies/
