Sarah Isgur, a former Department of Justice official, called out MSNBC host Ari Melber over MSNBC’s coverage of the investigation into allegations that Donald Trump’s successful 2016 presidential campaign colluded with Russia.
“I worked at the Department of Justice when the Mueller investigation was going on. It was a chief part of my job,” Isgur, who served as spokeswoman for the DOJ during the Trump administration, said in a panel with Melber and host Bill Maher. “There were news organizations, let’s just say, that kept telling their viewers Trump was about to get thrown in the gulag and was going to jail for the rest of his life when that was clearly not what was going on.” (RELATED: The Definitive List Of Media Screw-Ups On The Trump-Russia Story)
#StartTheClock: Tonight’s episode of #RealTime with @BillMaher feat. Christoph Waltz, @AriMelber & @whignewtons is now on @HBO and @HBOMax! pic.twitter.com/5dQKpcaVbI
— Real Time with Bill Maher (@RealTimers) February 18, 2023
“I covered that story, I love MSNBC, I love working there,” Melber, the host of “The Beat with Ari Melber,” said. “I would defend our journalism, although yes, you can find and we should be open to constructive criticism about any report. If you want me to speak about my reporting, we know each other. I never said Trump was about to be indicted, quite the opposite.”
MSNBC hosts and guests routinely hyped the claims that Trump’s 2016 campaign colluded with the Russian government to defeat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and that he could be facing prison time.
“If this were any other individual, Donald Trump would be going to jail,” former Acting Solicitor General of the United States Neal Katyal told guest host Ali Velshi during a December 2018 airing of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
Hosts often brought up a dossier assembled by Christopher Steele, which has since been discredited. The Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee were involved in funding the dossier
After the release of the Mueller report, MSNBC host Joy Reid claimed the report felt “like the seeds of a cover-up,” while MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, who hyped various claims of collusion, broke down over the report’s failure to include an indictment of Trump. A MSNBC panel on “All In With Chris Hayes” said the Mueller report “undercuts almost everything that was in the dossier.”
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