Allies of President Donald Trump are out in full force Friday night, rubbing in the revelation from Special Counsel Robert Mueller that BuzzFeed’s once-thought-to-be-explosive story alleging ex-Trump lawyer Michael Cohen provided Mueller with evidence that the president instructed him to lie to Congress is false.
President Trump himself came out swinging, again calling fake news “the enemy of the people.”
And he bashed BuzzFeed for publishing the fake dossier about him during the transition after he won the election:
Front and center cheering the demise of the BuzzFeed report was the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump, Jr., who in a dozen or so tweets late Friday mocked the publication his father once called a “failing pile of garbage.”
Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel hit BuzzFeed and the rest of media hard too:
Trump, Jr., hammered BuzzFeed from every direction–and also hit the rest of the media for going along with BuzzFeed’s fake news:
Trump, Jr., lit up the Democrats who latched onto the fake news report as well:
But Trump, Jr., and President Trump were hardly alone:
The story, which others in media and Democrats pounced on to push the narrative that Trump could be impeached and removed from office, cites “two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the matter” claiming that “President Donald Trump directed his longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.”
The BuzzFeed report says this is the first of any evidence to emerge that implicates Trump himself directly, as no evidence has surfaced in nearly two years of investigations that connects Trump to any wrongdoing:
The special counsel’s office learned about Trump’s directive for Cohen to lie to Congress through interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents. Cohen then acknowledged those instructions during his interviews with that office.
This revelation is not the first evidence to suggest the president may have attempted to obstruct the FBI and special counsel investigations into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
But, it turns out, this is entirely fake news and inaccurate. In response to the story, nearly a full day later, Mueller spokesman Peter Carr issued a rare statement rebuking BuzzFeed report as false.
“BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the Special Counsel’s Office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s Congressional testimony are not accurate,” Carr said on behalf of the Special Counsel’s Office.
Mueller’s office hardly ever issues any public statements, and almost never responds publicly to press inquiries other than toprovide court-ordered public releases of documents. So the decision to do so, and the impact of that decision, is particularly embarrassing for BuzzFeed. Incredulously, BuzzFeed is still standing by its story–despite the fact that Mueller nuked it.
But, in the wake of BuzzFeed’s effort to parse the statement from the Special Counsel’s office to somehow mean that its entire report is not being challenged, more reports have come out demonstrating that the Special Counsel’s statement is meant to challenge every bit of the BuzzFeed story:
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