While it appears from our limited vantage point that much of the "mainstream" corporate media -- broadcast and print -- seems to have completely whiffed on the import of yesterday's filings (their emphasis has mostly been on Michael Cohen's potential jail time rather than that an arm of the Justice Department has corroborating evidence that Individual 1 committed felonies or on offers of Russian "political synergy" to Trump's campaign organization), the Republican- wired media is even further into the ether of its alternative universe, often leading with the White House line on the Paul Manafort filings as a way to distract/ deflect from the breaking Cohen news.
Here's just a small sampling of "nothing to see here move along" headlines (we don't link to these cranks) as illustrations.
The Washington Examiner:
Manafort, Cohen legal filings include nothing new about Trump, White House claims
FoxNews.com:
'No collusion' by Trump with Russia shown in new Cohen and Manafort court filings
Boston Herald:
The Latest: White House says court filings show nothing new
The Washington Times:
Mueller recommends ‘substantial’ jail time for Cohen, but no Russian collusion mentioned
and
Mueller accuses Manafort of lying, but not about Russia collusion
"No collusion! No collusion! You're the collusion!" Well, you get the half- assed, distorted picture. This, of course, is if they're even covering it at all. Pretty much what you'd expect, and why there's about 40 percent of the population living in Trump's artificial world.
We've already briefly covered the importance of the Southern District of New York's Cohen filing, indicating there was corroborating evidence of Trump's commission of campaign finance felonies. But to briefly put a point on the claim that the Mueller filings on Manafort and Cohen show no evidence of "collusion," you would need to be able to read the redacted portions of the Manafort filing and also ignore the clues in Mueller's Cohen filing to come to such a risible, misleading conclusion. As the Special Counsel's office (SCO) previewed in its Cohen filing:
"...Cohen provided the SCO with useful information concerning certain discrete Russia- related matters core to its investigation that he obtained by virtue of his regular contact with [Trump] Company executives during the campaign."Tick tock tick tock.
