by Jon Dougherty
CBS News correspondent Leslie Stahl denied the Obama administration spied on the 2016 Trump campaign and discounted the corruption scandal surrounding Democratic nominee Joe Biden and his family while interviewing President Donald Trump for a “60 Minutes” segment broadcast Sunday.
At one point during the interview, the president said that his Democratic rival is not subjected to the same tough questioning from the establishment media as he is.
“I wish you would interview Joe Biden like you interview me,” he told Stahl. “It would be so good.”
“You like this, I thought. I thought you like sparring,” Stahl responded.
“I don’t mind it,” Trump said.
“When I watch him walk out of a store, and he’s walking with an ice cream, and the question the media ask him, ‘What kind of ice cream, what flavor ice cream do you have?’” Trump added as Stahl chuckled.
“And he’s in the midst of a scandal…” the president continued.
“He’s not,” Stahl interjected, smiling. “He’s not. Come on.”
“Of course, he is Leslie,” Trump responded, in reference to several allegations of corruption involving the vice president, his son Hunter Biden, and his brother James Biden first reported by the New York Post last week.
Emails discovered on the hard drive of a laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a computer repair shop in Delaware last year — a copy of which was provided to the Post — implicate the former vice president in pay-for-play schemes involving private and state-connected firms in Ukraine and China.
In addition, the recovered materials include a text message from Hunter Biden to his daughter Naomi suggesting he kicked back as much as 50 percent of all monies he received to his father.
Some of the most damning allegations including those implicating the former vice president have since been corroborated by a witness, Tony Bobulinski, a one-time business partner of the Bidens.
Bobulinski also said during a press conference Thursday that the Bidens “aggressively leveraged” their family name in order to secure lucrative business deals, including with Chinese state-owned entities.
But media outlets have refused to interview Bobulinski or report any further on the allegations contained in the Post’s original reports, falsely claiming they can’t be corroborated.
In his interview with Stahl, the president called the situation with Biden “the second biggest scandal.”
“The biggest scandal was when they spied on my campaign. They spied on my campaign, Leslie,” Trump said.
“There’s no real evidence of that,” Stahl responded.
“Of course, there is, it’s all over the place. Leslie…” Trump said. “They spied on my campaign and they got caught.”
Stahl then attempted to portray the long-running CBS newsmagazine as a final arbiter of truth.
Make no mistake, Stahl is not unaware of any of this. She simply won’t acknowledge the existence of those facts by asking question about it. Suppression means TOTAL suppression. CBS, among others, have spent 4 years suppressing the fact that Obama politically weaponized the IC, FBI and DOJ and used it against political opponents. It is verified Obama spied on the Trump campaign and Stahl can’t ask questions about it for fear that some may actually conduct their own research and find how extensively the media has been lying to them. If she asks Trump some questions, he might expose some really damaging details.
Meanwhile, they make sure they don’t over-tax Biden’s weakened brain and not ask him anything off-script. Yeah, that’s how you choose the best person for Leader of the Free World.
Trump is relying on the overhyped and half baked Hunter ordeal because he needs to distract from his abject failures and gross incompetence. If Trump wins, the Hunter laptop conspiracy will simply go away, just like Benghazi.
There’s no credible evidence Obama spied on Trump as he claims just as there’s no accomplishments associating Trump to the economy just as we’re not rounding the curb on COVID just as there’s no rationale for suburban women to adore him.
I was kinda hoping Stahl would ask what his flavor of ice cream was.
@Ronald J. Ward: Joe just said if we don’t wear masks, 200,000 more could die in two months. Do you think he is telling the truth?
Do you think selling influence to foreign countries is corrupt?
Do you think the Chinese having paid the Biden’s millions of dollars is a national security threat?
Do you think none of this is true?
The complete review of Spygate
https://www.theepochtimes.com/spygate-the-true-story-of-collusion_2684629.html
Obama’s Treasury Secretary was running their own illegal surveillance operation
https://theohiostar.com/2020/05/18/exclusive-the-treasury-department-spied-on-flynn-manafort-and-the-trump-family-says-whistleblower/
Records show Obama knew of the surveillance of Gen. Flynn
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/obama-knew-details-of-wiretapped-flynn-phone-calls-surprising-top-doj-official-new-docs-show?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A%20foxnews%2Fpolitics%20%28Internal%20-%20Politics%20-%20Text%29
Obama’s FBI was allowing outside contractors total access to NSA database, making inquiries that were 85% illegal
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/04/15/a-common-misconception-about-the-origin-of-spygate-political-surveillance-in-the-era-of-president-obama/
FISA abuse and errors widespread
https://dailycaller.com/2020/03/31/fbi-fisa-errors/
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/dojs-fisa-report-contradicts-claims-by-dems-media-experts-that-surveillance-rules-were-strictly-observed
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/fbi-inspector-general-report-fisa-scandal-about-corruption-not-sloppiness/
Do you think Leslie Stahl has access to the same internet I do?
@Deplorable Me:
National Review? Fox News (aka The Trump Channel)? The Daily Caller? The ConservativeTreehouse?
Here’s a take from The New York Times:
In the final stretch of the 2020 campaign, right-leaning news sites with millions of readers have published dozens of false or misleading headlines and articles that effectively back unsubstantiated claims by President Trump and his allies that mail-in ballots threaten the integrity of the election.
The Washington Examiner, Breitbart News, The Gateway Pundit and The Washington Times are among the sites that have posted articles with headlines giving weight to the conspiracy theory that voter fraud is rampant and could swing the election to the left, a theory that has been repeatedly debunked by data.
On Sept. 25, Gateway Pundit posted an article headlined “EXCLUSIVE: California Man Finds THOUSANDS of What Appear to be Unopened Ballots in Garbage Dumpster — Workers Quickly Try to Cover Them Up — We are Working to Verify.” The envelopes turned out to be empty and discarded legally in 2018. Gateway Pundit later updated the headline, but not before its original speculation had gone viral.
The Right Scoop published an article on Oct. 7 headlined “DESTROYED: Tons of Trump mail-in ballot applications SHREDDED in back of tractor-trailer headed for Pennsylvania.” The material was actually printing waste from a direct mail company. The publication later changed the headline to reflect that the claim had been debunked.
Another right-wing site, Daily Wire, posted a Sept. 24 article about ballots in Pennsylvania under the headline “FEDS: Military Ballots Discarded in ‘Troubling’ Discovery. All Opened Ballots were Cast for Trump.” Headlines on the same issue in The Washington Times were similar: “Feds investigating discarded mail-in ballots cast for Trump in Pennsylvania” and “FBI downplays election fraud as suspected ballot issues found in Pennsylvania, Texas.” A Washington Times opinion piece on the matter had the headline “Trump ballots in trash, oh my.”
Several days after the reports, neither Daily Wire nor The Washington Times appeared to follow up with articles on the announcement from Pennsylvania’s elections chief that the discarded ballots were a “bad error” by a seasonal contractor, not “intentional fraud.” Mr. Trump cited the discarded Pennsylvania ballots several times as an example of fraud, including in last month’s presidential debate.
Major polls have shown Mr. Trump lagging the Democratic presidential nominee, Joseph R. Biden Jr., in an election that will have significantly more people than usual voting by mail because of the coronavirus. False claims about mail-in voting have been a staple of the president’s campaign. At last month’s debate, he claimed without evidence, “This is going to be a fraud like you’ve never seen.”
In June, Mr. Trump posted on Twitter that “Mail-In Ballots will lead to a RIGGED ELECTION!” He linked to a Breitbart article that included a transcript of Attorney General William P. Barr’s telling the Fox News host Maria Bartiromo that voting by mail “absolutely opens the floodgates to fraud.”
In August, The New York Post published an article that relied on one anonymous source, identified as a Democratic operative, who claimed that he had engaged in voter fraud for decades. The Blaze, Breitbart, Daily Caller, FoxNews.com and The Washington Examiner posted their own versions of the article. It was also promoted by Donald Trump Jr. and his brother Eric, the Trump campaign’s communications team, the “Fox & Friends” television program and Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, according to a recent Harvard University study.
The Harvard researchers described a “propaganda feedback loop” in right-wing media. The authors of the study, published this month through the school’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, reported that popular news outlets, rather than social media platforms, were the main drivers of a disinformation campaign meant to sow doubts about the integrity of the election.
So far in October, Breitbart has published nearly 30 articles with the tag “voter fraud.” President Trump has posted links to several Breitbart articles on Twitter, including one in August in which a Republican-appointed poll challenger estimated that up to 20,000 absentee primary ballots had been improperly counted in Detroit, a city “known for voting heavily Democrat,” the article said. The Detroit News later reported that election officials in Michigan said the problems “weren’t examples of fraud and don’t call into question the integrity of the results.”
As the country faces a third wave of Covid-19 cases, tens of millions of Americans plan to mail their ballots, and more than 25 states have expanded access to universal mail voting. The voting system, stressed by greater demand, has struggled in places with ballots sent to incorrect addresses or improperly filled out. But intentional voter fraud is extremely uncommon and rarely organized, according to decades of research.
That’s true even though specific totals vary depending on the source. Among the billions of votes cast from 2000 to 2012, there were 491 cases of absentee-ballot fraud, according to an investigation conducted at Arizona State University’s journalism school. Election experts have calculated that, in a 20-year period, fraud involving mailed ballots has affected 0.00006 percent of individual votes, or one case per state every six or seven years.
In June, The Washington Post and the nonprofit Electronic Registration information Center analyzed data from three vote-by-mail states and found 372 possible cases of double voting or voting on behalf of dead people in 2016 and 2018, or 0.0025 percent of the 14.6 million mailed ballots.
Some conservative publications have nodded at the scarcity. In an Oct. 1 article about Facebook’s bans of ads that promote a narrative of widespread voter fraud, The Blaze noted “isolated reports of voter fraud in America in recent months.” A Fox News article on the same day pointed out a “false claim” by Mr. Trump that a mail worker in West Virginia had sold ballots. The Fox News article quoted a state official who said the incident had never happened.
Mr. Trump’s effort to discredit mail-in voting follows decades of disinformation about voter impersonation, voting by noncitizens and double voting, often promoted by Republican leaders.
Voting by mail under normal circumstances does not appear to give either major party an advantage, according to a study this spring by Stanford University’s Institute for Economic Policy Research. But many conservative outlets have promoted the idea that fraud involving mailed ballots could tip the scales in favor of Democrats.
Stephen J. Stedman, a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford, said he thought “about disinformation in this country as almost an information ecology — it’s not an organic thing from the bottom up.”
Last month, sites including The Gateway Pundit, The Washington Examiner and Breitbart followed a report from a Fox affiliate in Wisconsin about mail that had been found in a ditch and reportedly included absentee ballots. The story was promoted by the Trump adviser Jason Miller; the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany; the Fox News host Tucker Carlson; and the president himself.
After the outcry, all but unnoticed, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that the batch of mail hadn’t included absentee ballots from Wisconsin and that it was unclear if there had been ballots from other states. The liberal media watchdog group Media Matters for America traced several other examples.
In a similar cycle, the Fox News host Sean Hannity and conservative publications magnified the reach of a deceptive video released last month by Project Veritas, a group run by the conservative activist James O’Keefe. The video claimed without named sources or verifiable evidence that the campaign for Representative Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, was collecting ballots illegally.
Mr. Stedman said right-leaning outlets sometimes conflated fraud with the statistically insignificant administrative mishaps that occur in every American election.
“The pandemic is making this a true administrative nightmare, where administrators who have never done this on this scale have just a few months to do it, and they now also have the Trump administration trying to take advantage of every single mistake to say, ‘See, that’s fraud,’” Mr. Stedman said. “It can’t end well.”
Why has joe biden quarantined himself?
@Ronald J. Ward:
NEW YORK TIMES? An official propaganda outlet for the Democrats? REALLY?
NYT’s slight difference in coverage of Biden’s VP and Trump’s 4 years ago
NYT lies that Danchenko, Steele’s source for dossier “intel” was promised anonymity
https://www.redstate.com/shipwreckedcrew/2020/07/27/nyt-claim-that-primary-source-for-steele-dossier-was-promised-confidentiality-is-nonsense-obama-admin-officials-spreading-disinformation-again/
NYT socialist past; covering for communist famine
https://www.winterwatch.net/2019/06/portrait-of-evil-walter-duranty-the-new-york-times-moscow-bureau-chief-who-deliberately-hid-soviet-imposed-famine-that-killed-millions-in-ukraine/
Get reparations from the NYT
https://nypost.com/2020/07/18/the-family-that-owns-the-new-york-times-were-slaveholders-goodwin/#:~:text=John%20Mayer%2C%20who%20was%20married,put%20slavery%20at%20its%20core.
Strzok’s newly released notes prove the NYT lied in its article about Russian collusion… yet they do not correct it
https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/23/new-fbi-notes-re-debunk-major-nyt-story-highlight-media-collusion-to-produce-russia-hoax/
NYT has become nothing but far, far left propaganda
https://no-pasaran.blogspot.com/2020/07/1793-1776-or-1619-is-new-york-times.html
NYT apologizes for allowing an opinion other than a far left view
No confirmation of any briefing of Trump or validation of the intel about Russian bounties. More NYT lies
https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/30/media-are-playing-games-yet-again-with-anonymous-russia-leaks/
NYT lies about Trump being briefed on any intelligence about Russians offering bounties for US soldiers
https://nypost.com/2020/06/27/white-house-denies-trump-knew-about-russia-taliban-bounty-scheme/
NYT proves it sees its job as keeping truth and facts away from readers
https://nypost.com/2020/06/06/leftists-are-in-firm-control-at-the-new-york-times-goodwin/
Maybe what you should be wondering is why does everyone else report the facts and the NYT LIES? But, then again, you PREFER the lies. That’s why you spread them, like fertilizer, to grow OTHER lies.
@Deplorable Me:
In my comment above, I started to ask why not Redstate or the Federalist.
You don’t quite get it do you?
Let’s look at this interview again:
You and your cult have actually allowed yourself to be brainwashed into believing that any and all news agencies that reports anything negative about the leader of our government is fake news because you’ve been told to do so by the leader of our government.
@Ronald J. Ward: I provided you a LOOOOONG list of LIES the NYT has promoted, yet you take no notice. Meanwhile, without showing any examples of bias or lies, you discount other sources that do not reinforce your lies (all you actually care about). You don’t get it.
You don’t respond to questions because you can NEVER back up your lies with facts. Yet you feel you can criticize ANY information source? You and your opinions are completely disposable. Garbage.
Yeah, Trump calls the fake news FAKE NEWS. He gives examples, just as I did, so people will have doubts and curiosity about stories and, hopefully, they will research them. You don’t have that courage; you can’t research the things you desperately WANT to be true to find out if they ARE true because, frankly, you don’t care. Lies work better to promote your views than facts. As I said, the truth has no attraction for you.
Lesley Stahl, how does she get a job to interview the President stuttering whimpering, ill informed and lying.
The AG of the USA testified before congress that the President was spied on before and after the election.
Documents obtained by FOIA and Subpoena expose more of the last administrations illegal and unethical behavior on nearly a daily basis, yet this whimpering C still tries to gaslight her audience, then appalled that the President would dare release a non edited copy to the world, showing exactly what she is.
The President ended the interview because she was not in any way prepared for any high level discussion with the leader of the free world.
@kitt:
You don’t have to be that sharp to follow a liberal script and just say no to everything Trump says. The REAL effort comes from O’Donnell keeping a straight face while Biden yammers and lies.
Keep in mind that most of her audience have no idea what evidence has been uncovered.