Media Research Center blogger P.J. Gladnick has been laboring quite hard to pretend there’s nothing to see in regard to Donald Trump’s links with Russia. For instance, he declared in a March 8 post:
Be very careful Democrats and your mainstream media allies. The fake news story about collusion between the Donald Trump campaign and Russia is a minefield that could destroy your credibility even beyond conservative skeptics who already don’t believe you.
On March 9, Gladnick asserted that “the Trump-Russia fake news story is crumbling” and complained that an Associated Press writer talked to a few spy novelists for their take on this “fake news fiction.”He added: “Newsflash! If you had been following the real, not fake, news recently, the premise has definitely returned to the far-fetched category. Not one intelligence agency has provided proof of collusion between Trump and Russia. In fact the former Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, flat out denied it on Sunday.”
But as the AP has stated elsewhere, Clapper not signaling any evidence of collusion does not mean that none exists, or that none was discovered after Clapper left office on Jan. 20.
The next day, Gladnick ranted about a Politico report on the subject:
When reading the series of charts containing a weird labyrinth of rather tenuous connections published in the March/April edition of Politico Magazine, it is hard not to channel Inspector Jacques Clouseau trying to connect the unrelated dots to make the case that was always far off the mark. The Politico dots on the series of seven elaborate charts are chock full of oligarchs, both Russian and Ukrainian, a beauty contest, a mixed martial artist, a dossier that no one has seen, a couple of Russian energy giants not to be confused with a regular Russian oil company, and, to top it off, a mystery person. This is the laughable evidence presented by reporter Michael Crowley to desperately give the Trump-Russia fake news story an aura of validity despite no proof.
The only things that seem to be missing from Crowley’s charts are Boris Badinov and Natasha.
Gladnick went on to assert that “the only ones to be shaken by the Trump-Russia fake news story are the mainstream media and the Democrats,” who are in a “futile search for the Trump-Russia collusion Holy Grail.”
Gladnick hasn’t written anything in a few days, so we don’t know what he thinks about the news that the FBI is officially investigating allegations of coordination between the Trump campaign and Moscow while Russia was interfering in the presidential election.
He probably thinks that’s “fake news” too.