CNN's Camerota: 'It's Our Job' to Teach Viewers To 'Shut Down' Conservative Arguments

June 14th, 2019 5:15 PM

On Friday's New Day, coverage again returned to a recent ABC News interview in which President Trump expressed a willingness to accept foreign information about political opponents. A panel of guests gathered around to spew their takes on the situation, with host Alisyn Camerota livid at Fox News and Republicans for pointing out that the Clinton campaign received dirt on Trump from Russia in 2016.

 

 

Camerota was blind to the correlation between the DNC-funded Steele dossier and the situation Trump described during his interview. Christopher Steele, a former British spy, was employed by Fusion GPS to obtain information on the Trump campaign during the 2016 election. Steele used Russian sources to gather this information. The fact that it’s a crime for a foreign national to provide information of “value” to a candidate to influence an election is a violation of federal law was lost on the host:

ALISYN CAMEROTA: One of the things on the right the talking point you hear over and over again on Fox and you hear from the President's surrogates, Hillary Clinton did it.

JOHN AVLON: Sure.

CAMEROTA: They hired Christopher Steele. I find this one to be mind-scrambling. One -- one went this way where a campaign or the DNC has a vetted source that they reach out to, another came in this way from a foreign adversary into the Trump tower with who knows what agenda, unvetted…

AVLON: Well --

CAMEROTA: …don't know the players, who knows -- and bringing in all sorts of bogus information about it.

CNN’s senior political analyst John Avlon stated that there was “no comparison” between Steele dossier and working with a “hostile foreign government.” CNN again forgot the Russian sources used for Steele’s report, as well as the fact that legally there is no difference between the two.

Co-host John Berman echoed this sentiment when he spouted: “Christopher Steele is not a country. Check the map. He is not a freaking country and Russia is.”

Berman urged the panel to move on from the topic, so Camerota helped wrap up the segment by saying this: “I think it's our job also to give people, the viewers, ways to shut it down if they are intrigued by that argument because they make it so often.” Camerota is wildly incorrect on what the function of her job is. An “objective journalist” should be striving to let the facts stand for themselves, not attempting to teach her viewers ways to debate with conservatives.

Here is the complete transcript:

CNN New Day

06/14/2019

8:07 AM EST

ALISYN CAMEROTA: One of the things on the right the talking point you hear over and over again on Fox and you hear from the President's surrogates, Hillary Clinton did it.

JOHN AVLON: Sure.

CAMEROTA: They hired Christopher Steele. I find this one to be mind scrambling. One -- one went this way where a campaign or the DNC has a vetted source that they reach out to, another came in this way from a foreign adversary into the Trump tower with who knows what agenda, unvetted…

AVLON: Well --

CAMEROTA: …don't know the players, who knows -- and bringing in all sorts of bogus information about it.

AVLON: You’ve got to remember that this isn't about the Russian Trump Tower meeting. This is about the top line conclusions of the Mueller report that the Russians wanted to influence the election on Donald Trump's behalf and the campaign expected to benefit from that and it was disseminated stolen information which was disseminated through Wikileaks. There is no comparison between what Christopher Steele did for Fusion GPS and with a hostile foreign government.

CAMEROTA: Every day.

AVLON: Of course. It's ironically an old Soviet technique called whataboutism. It's about distracting, deflecting and making it about something irrelevant.

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: And by the way, Christopher Steele did call the FBI, right?

AVLON: Yes!

GLORIA BORGER: And John McCain demanded it go to the FBI.

AVLON: And Lindsey Graham was aware of it as well.

JOHN BERMAN: I literally have no time for that argument, I mean, which is why I'm moving on. I think -- it's absurd. It’s an absurd argument.

CAMEROTA: I understand you have no time for it, but I think it's our job also to give people, the viewers, ways to shut it down if they are intrigued by that argument because they make it so often.

BERMAN: Christopher Steele is not a country. Check the map. He is not a freaking country and Russia is.