Pete Kasperowicz of the Washington Examiner documents mainstream media outlets’ response to the latest developments in the ongoing Russian probe.
After nearly nine months of a special counsel probe into President Trump’s links to Russia, the press is still searching for a way to describe it, and in many cases, still appears to be learning on the fly what it’s all about.
The press eagerly jumped into the fray last summer by saying special counsel Robert Mueller was looking for signs of “collusion” between Trump and Russia that might have helped him defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
The press moved away from that word in the fall, and started zeroing in on the idea that Trump might actually face obstruction of justice charges. That shift reflected a new but unsupported theory, based on a tweet from Trump, that the president may have known that former national security adviser Michael Flynn lied to the FBI, and that Trump may have obstructed justice by not revealing that lie.
But over the last week, the press has shifted once more, and has become enamored with a few new words that it thinks might get Trump in trouble. Writers and TV personalities are decidedly over the word “collusion” ever since Trump denied collusion repeatedly in a New York Times interview over the holiday break.
