The Media Research Center is eager to distract from President Trump’s links to Jeffrey Epstein, and Curtis Houck demonstrated how in a Feb. 17 post:
Unlike their January 26 interview with our friend and conservative talk radio host Dana Loesch, Monday’s CBS Mornings brought on House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) for what became seven minutes of hits from the left on the Epstein files, voter integrity, and demands for Republicans “compromis[ing]” to the Democratic position on Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) “reforms.”
Featured co-host Vladimir Duthiers also did the Loesch segment, but this time he came loaded for bear, first arguing “Congress appears to be in no hurry to end the latest partial government shutdown” with Republican refusing to acquiesce to Democrat proposals for “major changes” to ICE.
[…]The CBS liberal shifted to the Epstein files which, through Saturday, CBS’s flagship newscasts have spent 309 minutes obsessing over since July. Here again, Duthiers set up the discussion on Democratic terms by wondering if he’s “satisfied with” the release of the files and if “enough has been done by the Justice Department.”
When Emmer replied this level of focus was nowhere to be found in the first Trump administration or the Biden administration, Duthiers discounted that by citing Epstein files cheerleader Ro Khana (D-CA) having expressed regret.
Mark Finkelstein was similarly eager to distract in a Feb. 26 post:
Appearing Thursday on Morning Joe, MS NOW’s Ali Vitali conceded there are “valid questions” about Bill Clinton’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein — enough to justify a House Oversight deposition.
But the only connection Vitali mentioned? “He appears in photos.”
Left unmentioned was what ABC News has reported: Bill Clinton was listed on 26 Epstein flight legs — though some were segments of the same international trips. Still, 26 entries in the logs. Not one. Not “a couple.” Twenty-six.
Morning Joe viewers would never have known it.
[…]Moments later, Vitali turned to tit-for-tat politics:
“If we are asking spouses to talk about what their husbands might have been privy to, why are we not also asking Melania Trump that question?”
So Hillary is framed as a victim of sexist scrutiny — but the remedy, Vitali suggests, is expanding that scrutiny to Melania. One could argue that Melania married Trump in 2005, after his friendship was Epstein was already on the rocks, while Hillary was married to Bill through everything. They also share the Clinton Global Initiative, which Epstein’s collaborator Ghislaine Maxwell helped to set up.
Finkelstein further huffed that Bill Clinton “was listed on 26 Epstein flight legs — a revealing omission.” But he won’t talk about Trump’s indisputable links to Epstein. Is that also a revealing omission?
Steve Malzberg cheered the MRC’s favorite CNN right-winger in a March 1 post, asserting that “Scott Jennings and presented a disclaimer of sorts” by noting that the Epstein files “are of an investigation that contains allegations. It is not saying that those allegations are true,” adding that “the only real true thing that we know is that [Trump] called up the police in Florida and said, you need to look at this. You need to look at this guy. You need to look at Ghislaine Maxwell. He was telling them he was warning them about what Jeffrey Epstein was doing.” When another panelist brought u-p the Steele dossier, Jennings ranted that it “was a bunch of uncorroborated crap, and you’re trying to stick it to the guy.”
The same day, Clay Waters groused that “PBS’s Washington Week with The Atlantic remains a reliably Democrat-boosting/Republican-bashing political roundtable, but this Friday, the show featured a tiny, overdue peek into an under-covered angle of the sordid Jeffrey Epstein saga, which thus far the media has used as a cudgel against President Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress.” He then happily touted in article in the Atlantic that noted, in the words of one writer, that “the reason that this is coming out now, I think, is because party leadership had been very, very clear to a rank and file, do not pursue this, in part, I think out of concern about donors, about the Clintons.” Of course, Waters won’t explain why he doesn’t want to talk about the Trump-Epstein connection now.