Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 09:09 pm
MSNBC’s Joy Reid put Donald Trump surrogate Steve Cortes in place on Tuesday night after he said Trump should get the benefit of the doubt for his illegal contribution to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, which was given while Bondi decided whether to look into the fraudulent Trump University.
Shortly after Trump, via his foundation, improperly donated $25,000 to a Bondi-affiliated political group, the investigation was magically dropped.
This is the textbook definition of pay-to-play, yet the media has largely ignored it and instead chooses to cover baseless accusations about the Clinton Foundation – an A-rated organization that has helped millions of people around the globe.
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Cortes had admitted that Trump’s gift to Bondi looks sketchy, but he now says Trump should get the benefit of the doubt. The Clintons, who have used their foundation to do nothing close to what Trump did in this case, are really the guilty ones, Cortes said.
Reid was having none of it:
@JoyAnnReid not taking the lies from Cortes #TrumpBribesPoliticians pic.twitter.com/ZTnjRiDngp
— James Russo (@JamesRusso2d3d) September 7, 2016
“You don’t have anything to support that, sir,” Reid said on Cortes’s repeated claims about the Clinton Foundation. “If the AP or any media organization had a pay-to-play on the Clinton Foundation (as is the case with Trump’s foundation), trust me, it’s all we would be talking about. This is not peanuts; it’s actually troublesome.”
Hopefully, the rest of the media will follow the MSNBC host’s lead and recognize that the real pay-to-play scandal they crave isn’t coming from the Clinton Foundation – it’s coming from Trump’s.
Sean Colarossi currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was an organizing fellow for both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He also worked with Planned Parenthood as an Affordable Care Act Outreach Organizer in 2014, helping northeast Ohio residents obtain health insurance coverage.
