As the Russia scandal continues hanging over Donald Trump’s administration like a storm cloud, the president appears to be getting more desperate to change the subject, once again taking to Twitter on Tuesday evening to attack Hillary Clinton’s “ties” to Russia.
The 45th president whined, asking why nobody – other than Fox News, of course – isn’t willing to validate his crazy conspiracy theories about the Clintons.
Tweet:
Why doesn’t Fake News talk about Podesta ties to Russia as covered by @FoxNews or money from Russia to Clinton – sale of Uranium?
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— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 28, 2017
Trump’s tweet comes just a day after he fired off similar tweets, calling the supposed ties between his administration and Russia a “hoax,” while pushing wild accusations about Hillary and Bill Clinton.
Meanwhile, in reality, fact checkers have lined up en masse to debunk Trump’s latest false claim, because what’s new?
PolitiFact reported on Tuesday that Trump’s claims about the Clintons are “unproven speculation,” while concerns over his own ties to Moscow are based on “significant supporting evidence,” or what some people like to call facts.
On the specific issue of the sale of uranium, which Trump mentioned in his tweets, PolitiFact reported this:
As PolitiFact and others have detailed, some investors with an interest in making the Uranium One deal go through have a long-time relationship with Bill Clinton and have donated to the Clinton Foundation. But there’s no concrete evidence those relationships or donations helped make the deal go through. Most of the donations occurred before Hillary Clinton could have known she would become secretary of state. And again, the secretary of state was one of nine agency heads that had input into the final decision, which ultimately lay with President Barack Obama.
When it comes to former Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s supposed ties to Russia, another popular Trump claim in recent days, the fact-checking organization had this to say:
There doesn’t appear to be anything untoward or illegal about the fact that Podesta sat on a corporate board with a Russian banker. Nonetheless, some of his and Clinton’s critics have played it up. Conservative website the Daily Caller has alleged that Podesta didn’t properly disclose his shares in Joule when he joined the Obama administration in 2014.
In any case, the company is American, not Russian.
Nice try, Donald. But PolitiFact wasn’t done.
“In his tweets, Trump seems to suggest that the Clintons and their associates were working on behalf of Russia’s interests,” the fact-checker continued. “That’s hard to square with the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia interfered in the election in order to harm Hillary Clinton and elect Trump instead.”
Once again, the President of the United States is hoping to distract his way out of another controversy, but as investigations into his ties to Russia continue to heat up, the scandal isn’t going anywhere, despite Trump’s desperate, unhinged tweets.
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.
