Former ESPN anchor and political commentator Keith Olbermann has become completely unhinged, calling for the immediate arrest of Jared Kushner for…something.
The appearance of anything “kinda, sorta, maybe,” seems to be resembling that impropriety is the new criminal legal stand for the left.
While Olbermann’s descent mirrors that of his former employer–a relic from antiquity that once was entertaining, but now is obnoxiously political–the left-leaning New York Times has held onto a modicum of its journalistic integrity.
The Times wrote a detailed account of America’s history of back-channeling.
From the New York Times:
There was Robert F. Kennedy’s still-mysterious phone call with an Izvestia correspondent, actually a Soviet spy, on Dec. 1, 1960, signaling that his brother, the president-elect, wanted to change the nature of the United States’ relationship with its Cold War adversary. It wasn’t exactly a success: First came the Bay of Pigs, then the Cuban missile crisis.
There was Richard M. Nixon’s secret channel to the South Vietnamese through Anna Chennault, a prominent Republican fund-raiser, urging the South Vietnamese to deflect President Lyndon B. Johnson’s effort to join peace talks in Paris because Nixon, she said, would give them a better deal. Fifty years later, historians are still arguing over what Nixon’s direct role was, and whether, as Johnson railed, the action was “treasonous.”
Back channels during presidential transitions are not unprecedented, but they are always fraught, as President Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, have discovered in recent weeks.
[…]
Back channels themselves are as old as American diplomacy. Thomas Jefferson was an early enthusiast — he often routed around his secretary of state, once sending a secret letter to the American envoy in France, Robert Livingston, that contained a coded message.
It was part of the secret effort that led, the next year, to the Louisiana Purchase. “There may be matters merely personal to ourselves, and which require the cover of a cipher more than those of any other character,” Jefferson wrote at the time.
[…]
Almost every president since has similarly indulged, up to Mr. Obama’s decision to dispatch Jake Sullivan and William Burns to feel out an opening with Tehran that laid the groundwork for the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
According to the left, Kushner should be raked over the coals for allegedly attempting to set up a legal back-channel in keeping with U.S. precedent because allegedly the Russians colluded with the Trump team.
And on the collusion front, Democratic Senator Mark Warner told CNN, “Listen, there’s a lot of smoke. We have no smoking gun at this point. But there is a lot of smoke.”
Translation? Despite numerous deep-state leaks and testimony from current and former law and order position-holders, zero evidence of collusion has surfaced.
In order to believe in the collusion theory, one must simultaneously believe the Trump team was expert enough to collude with Russia without anyone knowing about it, yet also green enough to “pressure” the former FBI Director to drop the investigation, then fire him publicly and spectacularly, unleashing his anger.
The argument that gets lost in the shuffle is this: If the Trump team colluded with Russia in such an impressively clandestine manner, why would they need a back-channel now? They wouldn’t.
The facts are simple. So don’t be swayed by flimsy arguments and shock-value reporting.