A daily roundup of the biggest stories in right-wing media.
On Tuesday, Fox News retracted a story posted last week suggesting that DNC staffer Seth Rich had been in contact with WikiLeaks before his death last year. The claim has been heavily pushed by Sean Hannity even though the story’s key source, private investigator and Fox News contributor Rod Wheeler, has admitted he has no evidence to support it. On his radio show on Tuesday, Hannity defended himself. “This issue is so big now that the entire Russia collusion narrative is hanging by a thread,” he said. “And all you in the liberal media, I am not Fox.com or FoxNews.com. I retracted nothing.”
Breitbart’s Joel Pollak found different ammunition against the Russia collusion narrative: former CIA director John Brennan’s testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, during which he said he did not know whether Russians colluded with the Trump campaign. “[D]emocrats are thrilled by his testimony, because he said there were contacts between Russian officials and some ‘U.S. persons involved in the Trump campaign, and hence an FBI investigation was warranted,’” Pollak wrote. “It is not unreasonable to wonder whether Brennan followed the liberal media down a Russian rabbit-hole, where the absence of evidence would not end his suspicions.”
The Washington Examiner’s Byron York noted that since the firing of James Comey, Trump’s Russia troubles have largely shifted from questions about collusion to questions about a potential cover up. “Focusing on alleged obstruction, the president’s enemies no longer have to find an underlying crime on his part to attempt to remove him from office,” he wrote. “Certainly, Trump has good arguments to make in his defense, beginning with what legally constitutes obstruction. But after the last two weeks, his supporters can no longer assume that his detractors will have to find an underlying crime to make big trouble for the president.” National Review editor Rich Lowry concurred. “This evolution removes the pressure from Democrats to produce any evidence of collusion with the Russians, which was supposed to be the scandal at the beginning,” he wrote. “If Democrats take the House next year with any margin for error, I would expect them to impeach Trump even in the absence of a smoking gun.”
In other news:
National Review ran an editorial on the Trump budget, which earned praise for its cuts to Medicaid, Social Security and SNAP—and criticism for its paid family leave program:
Less sensible is the Trump administration’s plan to create an extraordinarily expensive — $25 billion a year — new federal entitlement program: paid family leave. This is a pet project of the president’s daughter Ivanka, and congressional Republicans should reject it out-of-hand. A one-size-fits-all leave program imposed by Washington on every business sector is a plan for disaster, an exercise in sentimentality that almost certainly would prove more expensive than its already large cost estimate. We need to see less of Washington’s heavy hand in the boardroom, not more of it.
Lifezette’s Jim Stinson focused on reaction to the budget in the media. “With Trump in Europe on his first foreign trip, the press let loose their tirades,” he wrote. “The New York Times could barely hide its contempt for the document.”
At Heat Street, Ian Miles Cheong scolded liberals on Twitter over reactions to the Manchester bombing on Monday night. David Leavitt, an “unemployable clown” and a “proud male feminist ally with a BA in Humanities and Social Sciences from University of Massachusetts Dartmouth” had, for example, tweeted jokes about Ariana Grande in the immediate aftermath of the attack. “Clearly reveling in the attention, he doubled down with even worse tweets until his former employers at CBS Local and AXS issued statements distancing their companies from him.” At Red State, Amelia Hamilton singled out a tweet by game developer and Democratic House candidate Brianna Wu that argued sexism played a role in the attack. “[T]here is one grain of truth in her tweet, which one can only assume was accidental,” Hamilton wrote. “According to her Twitter bio, Wu is also ‘ready for a bolder Democratic party.’ Maybe this version of the Democratic party will be ready to admit that Radical Islam has a misogyny problem.”
