-We were the only ones that played this straight --
ever.
The only ones that played this straight.
The media, CNN, MSNBC,
were all in on the collusion hoax.
-Hoax? Come on.
-The Justice Department announced this evening
that a Special Counsel
has been appointed to investigate the allegation
that the Russian government attempted to influence
the 2016 presidential election.
-When you have a document coming from the Justice Department
under a Republican president
saying that we want to look into possible cooperation
between a US presidential campaign
and the Russians, you have a story.
That's not a hoax.
That's a lead.
Michael Flynn was the National Security Advisor
to start out the Trump presidency
and he was gone a few weeks later.
Why?
Because he lied about his contacts
with the Russian ambassador.
Trump said when he fired James Comey that Russia
was on his mind.
-And in fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself,
I said, "You know, this Russia thing with Trump
and Russia is a made up story,
it's an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election."
-Plus Helsinki. Remember Helsinki?
-My people came to me, Dan Coats came to me and some others
and they said, "They think it's Russia."
I have President Putin, he just said it's not Russia.
I will say this, I don't see any reason why it would be.
-It wasn't like some, you know, crazy conspiracy
by lefty journalists to just gin up something over nothing.
There was a lot to feed on.
The other problem is that President Trump kept on saying
"witch hunt," he protested way too much about this situation.
I'm sorry, but given his record on trustworthiness,
his constant denials were more fuel for the fire.
So it was a worthwhile pursuit.
Does that mean that the implementation was perfect?
No, it doesn't. There were a lot of mistakes.
Brian Ross has said that Trump had directed Michael Flynn
to reach out to the Russians during the campaign,
which would be a real collusive problem.
He didn't.
He did that during the presidential transition.
CNN had a couple retracted or highly corrected stories
relating to this whole Russian thing,
one dealing with Anthony Scaramucci.
Mistakes happen, we're a profession populated by humans.
But what can't really be corrected
or retracted is volume.
And this is where I believe the real underside
of the media's coverage of Trump/Russia really,
really exposes itself.
All these cable news networks,
they have to understand the power of their hour.
CNN, now, they say on their website
they have nearly 4,000 news professionals.
Some of those news professionals were probably covering ISIS,
some of them maybe climate change, some of them --
I don't know, Medicare for All.
You know, you figure they might be able to work
a lot of that in.
-This is the saddest media spectacle I've ever seen.
-The media, the press has done one of the great
reporting jobs in the history,
especially of covering a presidency.
-Those were sort of polar opposites in terms
of the assessment of the American media.
It's either got to be the biggest disaster
or the greatest success.
Can we have a B-minus or a C-plus?
You know, can we honestly assess things?
We know from the letters that Mueller had like 19 lawyers,
some 40 FBI agents,
they interviewed like 500 witnesses.
Add up "The Washington Post," "The New York Times,"
ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, so on and so forth,
you see that the media probably outnumbers the Mueller people,
although they have fewer investigative tools.
They spent two years
basically investigating alongside the Mueller report.
The fact that they sunk so many resources into that effort
and came up with nothing, if I were Donald Trump,
I'd be Tweeting, "Thank you,
US media, for looking so deeply into this."
-So it's complete exoneration, no collusion, no obstruction.
Thank you very much.
-One thing the Mueller report did figure out,
one thing that it did expose,
is that not only is Donald Trump a liar,
but his associates, by his association with them,
they lie a lot too.
We know about President Trump's lies,
he's up over 9,000 false and misleading claims
according the "The Washington Post."
Here are a bunch of documents
showing exactly how his associates do the same thing.
Manafort, Cohen, Papadopoulis, all these people,
they just lied and lied and lied and lied.
And if you're going to sit there
and say that it's all worthless and a waste of time,
you are declaring in that same sentence
that you don't care about truthfulness
in contemporary American society and politics,
and that's a real problem.