Americas Worst Columnist Still Convinced Trump Is Innocent
By Jonathan Chait
Republican apparatchik, lobbyist, and America’s Worst Columnist™ Ed Rogers has used his inexplicably extant perch in the Washington Post to publish a morbidly hilarious series of defenses of Donald Trump’s connections to Russia. In the face of a massive and continuously growing body of evidence, Rogers has painted for his readers a story of an innocent man framed by a desperate news media ...
... Robert Mueller’s inquiry concerns the Russian campaign to influence the outcome of the American presidential election. The fact that Manafort ran a Russian campaign to influence a presidential election in another country very recently before becoming Donald Trump’s campaign manager seems relevant. Rogers is basically saying the chopped-up bodies of those hitchhikers the police found in his client’s basement freezer are totally irrelevant to the current search for missing hitchhikers ...
... Rogers says “the report shows” Cohen received no reply. The report does not say this. It does not even say that Cohen claims to have received no reply. It says, “Cohen told congressional investigators in a statement Monday that he did not recall receiving a response from Peskov or having further contact with Russian government officials about the project.” Given the high number of instances of Trump officials failing to recall contacts with Russian officials that in fact occurred, a professed lack of recall has very little evidentiary value.
... the public not caring about the Russia scandal would not prove Trump is innocent. The public was relatively indifferent about Watergate until very late into it. Second, the selected questions of constituents in one Republican district are not a scientific measure of national opinion. Third, while it is true the Russia scandal is not the public’s highest concern, polls have not remotely borne out Rogers’s claim that “practically no one in flyover country believes there is anything to the collusion story.” <One> poll finds 55 percent of the public believe the Trump Tower Russia meeting indicates collusion. <Another> poll finds 25 percent think Trump acted illegally, another 37 percent think he acted unethically, and only 35 percent think he did nothing wrong ...
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/09/americas-worst-columnist-still-convinced-trump-is-innocent.html
