Plus, Schiff ignores other logical points, including that party platforms are essentially meaningless and that the savvy Putin would not likely take the huge risk of offending the odds-on winner of the presidential race, Hillary Clinton, for something as pointless as a word change in the GOP platform.
There is also the point that if Trump were a true "Manchurian candidate," he would have taken the more politically popular position of bashing Russia during the campaign and only reverse course after he got into the White House. That's how the scheme is supposed to work. (And, of course, all embassies including American ones have spies assigned to them, so there is nothing unusual about Ambassador Kislyak presiding at an embassy with spies.)
Other independent-minded journalists have noted various chronological problems with Steele's narrative, such as Marcy Wheeler at her emptywheel.net Website.
In other words, there are huge holes in both the evidence and the logic of Schiff's conspiracy theory. But you wouldn't know that from watching and reading the fawning commentary about Schiff's presentation in the mainstream U.S. news media, which has been almost universally hostile to Trump (which is not to say that there aren't sound reasons to consider the narcissistic, poorly prepared Trump to be unfit to serve as President of the United States).
The journalistic problem is that everyone deserves to get a fair shot from reporters who are supposed to be objective and fair regardless of a person's popularity or notoriety or what the reporter may personally feel. That standard should apply to everyone, whether you're a foreign leader despised by the U.S. government or a politician detested for your obnoxious behavior.
There is no professional justification for journalists joining in a TV-and-print lynch mob. We also have seen too often where such wrongheaded attitudes lead, such as to the group-think that Iraq's hated dictator Saddam Hussein was hiding WMDs, or in an earlier time to the McCarthyism that destroyed the lives of Americans who were smeared as unpatriotic because of their dissident political views.
So, yes, even Donald Trump deserves not to be railroaded by a mainstream media that wants desperately -- along with other powerful forces in Official Washington -- to see him run out of town on a rail and will use any pretext to do so, even if it means escalating the risks of a nuclear war with Russia.
And, if mainstream media commentators truly want a thorough and independent investigation, they should be demanding that it start by summoning the people who first made the allegations.
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