Over the weekend, the New York Times reported on a meeting that took place last year at Trump Tower between Trump campaign aides and a Kremlin lawyer. With the intelligence community saying that Russia had interfered with the election, no matter the credibility of the intelligence or how long the community has made the assessment, The administration has shown that they can change the narrative against the intelligence and the justice community or even be dismissive of it. Such was the case when the White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus made an appearance on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace where he spoke on behalf of the Trump administration.
Trump spokesman claims 'set up'
In his interview, he said that President Trump's legal council were looking at information they believed showed that the Kremlin lawyer was somehow associated with Democratic operatives. Priebus wasted no time in presenting a Conspiracy Theory Trump's legal council had created immediately after the New York Times broke the story. Priebus promoted their theory right at the beginning of Chris Wallace's questioning. This caused the host to immediately suggest what the White House's legal council spokesman Mark Corallo had already said over the weekend when he claimed that the meeting with the lawyer was a "set up."
The attack was on the Kremlin lawyer Natalia Veseknitskaya and her translator who was also present at the meeting.
Mark Corallo joined the Trump administration last month in order to put Trump's communications department back in functioning order so they could handle unfavorable coverage of Donald Trump. As a side note, it's also been reported that Corallo is part of Trump's wall of defense against special prosecutor Robert Mueller.
Alt-right media distributing conspiracy
In order to weaponize the narrative that Democrats were behind setting up the Trump family to create the origins of Russian collusion, Priebus referred to an article by an Internet news affiliate of the Sinclair Broadcast Group called Circa. Circa published an article that spins the narrative of the NY Times report for the Trump administration.
That being the claim that there was a connection between Fusion GPS, an intelligence firm out of Washington that does opposition research, and the meeting.
Priebus said that the Senate Judiciary Committee had subpoenaed the group about the investigation they were conducting on the Trump administration. Priebus suggested that there was something suspicious in the connection with Chris Wallace and also suggested that the claims were questionable recalling that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) servers had not been hacked yet. The Sinclair Broadcast Group is an alt-right propaganda news network which widely distributes Trump's agenda. The network has reportedly bought out various local news affiliates in order to distribute reporting that is favorable to President Trump and his supporters. They bought and relaunched Circa news in spring of 2016.
