Media trying pretty hard to claim Mulvaney acknowledged a Ukraine quid pro quo . . . but he didn't

The media are basically lying to you at this point. If you wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt, you’d say they’re getting confused and conflating two things that sound kind of alike but are not really the same.

I’m not inclined to give them that benefit of the doubt. They’re lying.

This is all about a press conference given yesterday by White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, who spent some time discussing the question of why military aid to Ukraine was temporarily held up. Now remember, the media want you to believe that Trump held up the aid in order to pressure Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden.

Mulvaney tried to address that yesterday:

“I was involved with the process by which the money was held up temporarily, OK?” he said. “Three issues for that: the corruption in the country, whether or not other countries were participating in the support of the Ukraine, and whether or not they were cooperating in an ongoing investigation with our Department of Justice. That’s completely legitimate.”

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The final condition Mulvaney listed appears refer to Attorney General William Barr’s investigation of foreign interference in the 2016 election, which critics have deemed an attempt by the White House to discredit the work of former special counsel Robert Mueller.

The “ongoing investigation” Mulvaney references here is not of the Bidens. It’s the Justice Department’s look into the origins of the Trump/Russia collusion hoax. Part of that investigation involves what happened in foreign countries where bogus sources fed bad information about Trump to the Clinton campaign via the dirtbag operation known as Fusion GPS.

The Justice Department wants Ukraine’s cooperation with that probe, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t have it. But as Mulvaney makes clear, there’s more to it than that. Ukraine’s goverment has been rife with corruption for years, and while newly elected President Volodymyr Zelensky wasn’t part of that scene, the administration still had concerns about whether the money would be spent as intended.

This is a perfectly legitimate explanation of why the money was temporarily held up, and none of it has anything to do with pressuring Ukraien to launch an investigation of the Bidens.

Yet look at the headlines from the MSM:

CNN: Mulvaney brashly admits quid pro quo over Ukraine aid as key details emerge

MSNBC: ‘It happens all the time’: Mulvaney tells reporter to ‘get over it’ after quid pro quo admission

New York Times: Mulvaney: Trump Held Back Ukraine Aid Pending Inquiry of Democrats

Washington Post: Mulvaney confirms Ukraine aid withheld in part to force probe of Democrats

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That is not what he said. And later he issued a written statement that attempted to counter the media’s false narrative:

Let me be clear, there was absolutely no quid pro quo between Ukrainian military aid and any investigation into the 2016 election,” he said in a written statement. “There was never any connection between the funds and the Ukrainians doing anything with the server … there was never any condition on the flow of the aid related to the matter of the DNC server.”

Of course, all the media does with that is claim Mulvaney is trying to “walk back” his earlier statement. (Who came up with the idiotic phrase “walk back” to describe someone who wants to disavow a previous statement?)

The media know exactly what Mulvaney meant, and what he didn’t mean. But this is the game. If you say something that can be misconstrued in the worst possible way, it will be construed in that way, and it will be your fault for using words that made the misconstruction possible.

If the media were doing their jobs honestly, they would make every attempt to understand what a speaker was really trying to say, and would report that meaning to their viewers and readers. But that’s not what they do. They play gotcha with public figures and try to destroy them with the most damning possible interpretation of everything that comes out of their mouths.

Especially if they come from the Trump White House.

Mick Mulvaney admitting nothing about a quid pro quo or anything else. But the media are trying to tell you he did, and if you call them out for it, they will say it’s Mulvaney’s fault for handing them the material they could so easily twist to suit their purposes.

This is why no one trusts the media. No one should.