The useful idiot from Louisiana
A few weeks ago, I wrote about Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) showcasing the “typical shell game” of Republicans on impeachment: Eliminate the importance of the “quid pro quo,” muddy the waters of the president’s motive and distort the impeachment process itself. Since then, the senator from Louisiana has taken his pro-Trump spin to a new level: repeating Russian disinformation without a care.
On Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” Kennedy began his interview with host Chuck Todd with a mea culpa for recently misstating that Ukraine, not Russia, hacked Democratic National Committee computers in 2016. One would think such embarrassment would lead one to be more cautious in his claims about Russia, Ukraine and the 2016 election. Not so with Kennedy. Instead, he told Todd:
I think both Russia and Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election. I think it is has been well documented in the Financial Times, in Politico, in the Economist, in the Washington Examiner, even on CBS that the prime minister of Ukraine, the interior minister, the Ukrainian ambassador to the United States, the head of the Ukrainian anti-corruption league, all meddled in the election on social media and otherwise. They worked with a DNC operative against the president.
Unsurprisingly, Kennedy’s summary of those articles bears little to no resemblance to the actual facts. For example, the Politico article that Kennedy cited reported only that “Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office" and by highlighting former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort’s close ties to Russia. And Politico notes that those efforts “were far less concerted or centrally directed than Russia’s alleged hacking and dissemination of Democratic emails.” Similarly, Kennedy noted that “a Ukrainian court ruled that Ukrainian officials had violated Ukrainian law by meddling in our election and that was reported in The New York Times" — without mentioning that a higher court later canceled that ruling.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/12/02/useful-idiot-louisiana/
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