Joy-ann Reid was ready when Wall Street Journal Columnist Kimberly Strassel attempted to deflect Trump’s team Russia collusion with Obama’s transition team in 2008. She forgot Reid is always prepared and fact-based, unlike the Right.
Joy-ann Reid did not allow Kimberly Strassel false deflection
WSJ’s Kimberly Strassel came with a talking point which does not work on a panel that gives time to refute. Joy-ann Reid used that time for the perfect rebuttal.
“I think we are having a discussion that is absolutely divorced from reality this week,” Kimberly Strassel said. “It is astonishing to me. Let me set the scene for you. It is 2008. We are having an election. And candidate Obama, he is not even President-elect, sends William Miller over to Iran to establish a back channel and let the Iranians know that should he win the election, they will have friendlier terms. Okay. So this is a private citizen going to foreign soil obviously in order to evade U.S. Intelligence monitoring and establishing a back channel with a sworn enemy of the United States who was actively disrupting our efforts with the military in the Middle East. So is that bad judgment? Is that a bad thing that happened? Back channels are completely normal. They happen all the times. Reagan did them. Obama did them. Every did. So I am not quite sure why supposedly having, at least the president is now elected, setting up a back channel with the Russians is somehow out of bounds.”
Joy-Ann Reid did not allow the false narrative to go unchallenged. In fact, she used it to further prove the suspicious nature of the Trump team’s actions.
“Here is one key difference,” Joy-Ann Reid responded. “In October, months before this latest meeting, and it was one of 18 separate contacts that we now know of between the Trump campaign and Russia, our primary adversary in the world. In October, the collective judgment of the 17 intelligence agencies had been that Russia had taken active measures to interfere in our elections. It’s quite a difference. We don’t think that Iran was doing that.”
Joy-Ann then illustrated perfectly the outright bizarre nature of the Trump team’s actions.
“So in December, the now president-elect decides that he is going to name Jim Mattis to be his Secretary of Defense,” Reid said. “But he doesn’t open a back channel. He [the president-elect] sends his real estate developer son-in-law, supposedly, decides to open this back channel, not just — and it isn’t a back channel by the way because this isn’t how it works — you don’t go to the adversary country and say let’s set something up inside of your secure facility, in your embassy, so that we evade our intelligence services, sorry, set it up in your secure facility, which even takes them aback. Because that’s bizarre, the idea that we are going to do this on your facility. And you send them to do that without Jim Mattis, the real estate developer who has no foreign policy experience whatsoever. And then, if it is a channel about opening up negotiations to do something with foreign policy, why are they also back channeling with a bank, a Kremlin-connected Russian bank. And why is the Reuters report saying that part of the discussion was the possibility of opening opportunities for financing for Trump-related …”
Strassel jumped in and said we do not know the answers to any of those questions. One wonders then why she had a staunch defense of Trump in the first place.
Conservative Radio Host Charlie Sykes statement on the panel was probative.
“You have to follow the money, the meetings, the lies to derail this investigation.” Charlie Sykes said. “And the reality here is that Jared Kushner and the Russian administration apparently trusted the Russians more than the intelligence community. How can this not be suspicious.”