The GOP's questions to Mueller seemed bizarre -- unless you watch Fox News
Source: Washington Post
The GOP’s questions to Mueller seemed bizarre — unless you watch Fox News
Treating right-wing conspiracy theories as smoking guns shows that Republicans are mostly speaking to their base.
By Nicole Hemmer
Nicole Hemmer is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia's Miller Center and author of "Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics." She is a co-editor of The Post's daily historical analysis section, Made by History.
July 24
When Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) had his turn to quiz former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III during the hearing Wednesday morning, he came armed with what he seemed to think was a smoking gun: that neither Glenn Simpson nor Fusion GPS were mentioned in Mueller’s report.
Most Americans no doubt shared Mueller’s apparent confusion about the line of questioning. He said he was not familiar with Fusion GPS, a private strategic-intelligence firm, and that Simpson, the organization’s founder, was outside the scope of his investigation. Yet as the hearings wore on, Republican lawmakers returned again and again to Simpson and Fusion GPS, treating them like household names. And for conservatives on a steady diet of right-wing media, they are: the linchpins of a conspiratorial witch hunt to impeach President Trump.
The GOP’s laserlike focus on Simpson, Fusion GPS, former FBI agent Peter Strzok and other bits of right-wing lore probably played well in conservative media (and, as a consequence, in the Oval Office). But it was almost certainly inscrutable to any American who is not dialed into Fox News, right-wing talk radio or conservative-leaning Facebook feeds. That has real consequences for a party that, in learning to speak to its siloed-off base, has forgotten how to reach a wider audience.
For the benefit of the Fox News crowd, Republicans raised a host of boogeymen Wednesday. In his opening statement in the House Intelligence Committee’s afternoon hearing, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) first dismissed election interference as the “Russia collusion conspiracy theory,” then spun out a conspiracy of his own, a rush of names including Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud, Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and — of course — Simpson, a topic he returned to during his question time. Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) interrogated Mueller on the number of times his report referenced the New York Times (75) and The Washington Post (60) vs. Fox News (25), as though that provided mathematical evidence of just how biased the special counsel’s team was. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) accused the government of “spying” on the Trump campaign, and he name-checked “Halper, Downer, Mifsud, Thompson” and Azra Turk, barely pausing to suggest who they were, much less what they might have done or how their circumstances exonerated Trump.
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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/07/24/gops-questions-mueller-seemed-bizarre-unless-you-watch-fox-news/
