Playing 3-D chess against a media who struggle with checkers

Sometime last week, the mainstream media decided we need to be angry some more at President Trump. Supposedly he had an interview with a DNC member masquerading as a journalist, George Stephanopoulos. All over the NPR airwaves, all over Mandarin Class twitter, everywhere for the next several days it was OMG He's about to sell out to the Russians.

My immediate response was; Trump is thinking past the sell as he usually does. It is uninteresting to consider how the press responds. They respond like Pavlovian dogs. It is easy to press their buttons. Given that Trump has for two years been playing three dimensional chess against media opponents who can barely handle checkers, the real question is what purpose was Trump seeking to achieve with this interview.

My conclusion was that, for whatever reason, Trump wanted to get the public to focus on how similar his statement to Stephanopoulos was to what happened with the Steele dossier. The DNC paid a British former spy to get information from Russia about Trump and then shopped the unvalidated "report" to the DOJ and the Obama administration for use against Trump. The administration then appears to have gone so far as to coordinate with the former foreign affairs minister in Australia to spy on the Trump campaign to get more dirt. So what is wrong with Trump accepting foreign information if it was appropriate for the prior administration to do so? That was my guess as to the game that Trump might be playing.

Getting the press, in their outrage at his statement, to accidentally shine light on what had happened under Obama. Bad actions which the press had implicitly endorsed. It seemed an odd thing to be doing at this particular moment but I have long ceased trying to second-guess Trump's manipulation of the press. All I can observe is how he is doing it, not why.

My suspicions were reinforced when I finally heard a portion of the actual interview rather than the mischaracterizations in the press. Trump specified that he would accept unsolicited foreign information from a friendly ally like Norway. All the stuff I had been hearing from journalists about Russia and the like was their projection.

Trump eventually issued a clarification that of course such information should be turned over to DOJ.

I gleaned all this passively. Stuff I was hearing and seeing without seeking it out. I considered it more bad reporting from the mainstream media, with massive over-inflation of pertinence, and almost no real value and therefore not worth paying attention to.

I see today this piece, Aren't delirious Democrats now accusing Team Obama of treason? by John Solomon, which has a slightly different spin but is in other regards consistent with my thoughts.

If you read the newspapers, tuned into the cable TV pundits or received an email from one of the Democrats running for president, you’d swear Donald Trump was back to his treasonous ways.

All that was missing was an annoying OMG text exclamation punctuating the unfounded claims that Trump might violate the law in 2020 by accepting intelligence on a political rival from a foreign country. The inference, of course, is that it would come from a hostile power such as Russia or North Korea or Iran.

Actually, what Trump told ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos was that he’d consider taking intelligence dirt about a rival from a friendly ally. (Norway was the actual example he used.)

Sound familiar? That is EXACTLY what the Obama administration did in 2016. It’s something no one in the media or the political space grasped during the tsunami of breathless reaction that followed the interview.

In July 2016, the Obama administration accepted unsolicited information from Alexander Downer, an Australian diplomat who just happened to have helped arrange a $25 million government donation to the Clinton Foundation years before. Downer said that he had witnessed a Trump campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, bragging about some dirt that the Russians supposedly had on Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

Though Downer’s claim was reported two-plus months after the alleged event, and was only hearsay gathered at a London tavern, the Obama administration gave it to the FBI which, in turn, thought it was weighty enough to justify opening a counterintelligence case against the lawfully elected Republican nominee for president.

In other words, the Democratic administration accepted dirt from a foreign friendly and used it to justify investigating its GOP rival.

And then, OMG, they did it again just a few weeks later.

In October 2016, less than three weeks from Election Day, the Obama Justice Department approved a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant to spy on the Trump campaign through its former adviser, Carter Page. The primary evidence supporting the warrant? A dossier written by a foreign friendly named Christopher Steele, a retired MI6 intelligence agent from Great Britain. Of course, the Justice Department and the FBI forgot to tell the courts that Steele actually was working on behalf of the Clinton campaign, but that’s a small detail for the purpose of this column.

For the second time in three months, the Obama administration took dirt on Trump from a foreign ally — this time, from one in Europe — and weaponized it for a criminal investigation.

No offense, but the media really are giving Trump way too much credit for the idea he floated on ABC News. The real scandal is that he’s just plagiarizing a playbook already used by Obama, Clinton and those 2016 Democrats.

And every Democrat and media pundit who accuses Trump of treason for considering taking dirt from, say, Norway in 2020 has now, by extension, accused the Obama administration of committing treason in 2016.

Of course, you’d never know that from the way the media and politicians have treated it.