“Ultimate professional” Martha MacCallum either missed the damaging admissions elicited from Trump pal Corey Lewandowski in yesterday’s hearings or else she deliberately decided against mentioning them.
As predictably as the sun sets in the west, Lewandowski, Donald Trump's former campaign manager and potential U.S. Senate candidate, ran to Fox News yesterday after he made a series of damaging admissions during the House Judiciary Committee’s contentious impeachment inquiry.
Presumably, Lewandowski chose MacCallum’s show for extra credibility points. According to Fox, MacCallum embodies “ultimate journalistic integrity and professionalism.” But that is more often a mantle under which MacCallum reliably parrots the Fox Party line.
So her chummy interview with Lewandowski was not a huge surprise. Still, it was shocking, even by MacCallum standards, that she never brought up what Democratic counsel Barry Berke elicited from Lewandowski about, as Vox described it, Trump's request that he “deliver a message to then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions pressuring him to retake control of the Russia probe and restrict it only to future election interference.” The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin noted that Berke “made perfectly clear that Lewandowski’s actions (refusing to deliver Trump’s instructions, demanding immunity, lying on TV, creating no record) demonstrated he knew he was being asked to do something wrong or illegal.”
MacCallum didn’t even mention that, along the way, Lewandowski had admitted having no problem lying to the public on television.
Instead, MacCallum began by implicitly validating Lewandowski’s attack on the hearing as an anti-American act by Democrats. That’s not in the video below but it is in the Fox transcript:
So, now, when asked by Congressman Matt Gaetz today why Democrats continue, despite perhaps what the polling says. Here’s Corey Lewandowski on that.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
LEWANDOWSKI: You know, Congressman. I think they hate this president more than they love their country.
If MacCallum thought of any other reason why the hearing was held, she kept it to herself.
Her first question to Lewandowski was, “You’ve had a busy day, how did you think it went?” After Lewandowski replied that he had merely “reiterated what the American people already knew” and that the hearing was merely an effort by the “far-left wing of the Democratic Party” to avoid losing primaries, “ultimate journalist” MacCallum “followed up” by asking why he went and whether it was only “because of the subpoeana?”
Lewandowski responded, “I’ve always said I will come and answer questions. … I have nothing to hide because we never committed any crimes at the campaign.”
Besides the fact Berke made clear Lewandowski had demanded immunity before testifying to the special counsel, Lewandowski’s comment was laughable because he had just spent hours stonewalling the committee.
When MacCallum finally tiptoed up to the meat of Lewandowski’s testimony, she immediately signaled her solidarity: "So, the core—you know, just to go to the core of the questioning. They really focused on the president’s request to you to have a conversation with Jeff Sessions about removing Robert Mueller, which you say you never ended up doing, correct?"
MacCallum then allowed Lewandowski to reiterate his ridiculous claim: that he never delivered the message because he went on vacation. Berke had masterfully established the more self-serving and damning-to-Trump reasons for Lewandowski’s behavior. But other than to note the comment got laughs, MacCallum did not challenge a word.
Her next question was designed to exculpate both Lewandowski and Trump. Lewandowski was grateful:
LEWANDOWSKI: That’s—it’s such an important point. You—you’ve articulated what’s so important. Mueller had free rein, all the way through his investigation to conduct in any way he wanted, neither the acting attorney general, the deputy attorney general or the current attorney general attempted to impede the Mueller investigation.
Next, the two chatted about how the impeachment-inquiry hearings are supposedly bad for Democrats. And despite the obvious obstruction of justice revealed at the hearing, Lewandowski declared, “So, if [Trump] is guilty of something, it’s of putting America first.”
“Yeah,” MacCallum replied.
Watch MacCallum prove her utter lack of journalistic integrity and professionalism above, from the September 17, 2019 The Story with Martha MacCallum.
Published with permission of NewsHounds.us
