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Monday, April 3, 2017

Tonight's Big Story According To CBS

There are a number of really important stories in the news today.  The biggest news is that Susan Rice has been identified as the Obama administration official who gathered all the surveillance materials from the intelligence agencies that picked up the Trump campaign, the Trump transition team and Trump himself and then "unmasked" the Americans.  As the National Security Adviser to President Obama, Rice had the power to do this, but only if it was done for national security purposes.  We don't know yet for certain, but it has been reported that she did all this for political purposes having nothing to do with national security.  Especially since Rice was with Obama nearly every day, it seems pretty clear that Obama was aware of this misuse of America's intelligence agencies to spy on the Trump team.

Another big story is the committee vote approving judge Gorsuch's nomination to the Supreme Court.  A vote is scheduled for Friday and we will likely see the Senate rules changed to prevent a filibuster threatened by the Democrats.

There was a major terror attack in Russia and a second attack was thwarted by Russian police.  It looks like there will be over a dozen people killed.  This too is a major story.

Because there is so much big news, I decided to see what story CBS News would use to lead off their Evening News broadcast.  It should have been the Susan Rice fiasco, but I was curious if CBS could bring itself to lead off with such bad news for the Democrats.

Guess what CBS pushed as the top story of the day?  New documents released regarding President Trump's trust into which he put his assets reveal that Trump can take money from the trust whenever he wants without disclosing the withdrawal.  CBS pushed the story as if it were a scandal.  In reality, it is a non-story.

The point of a blind trust is not to cut the creator of the trust off from his money.  Rather, the purpose is to insulate that money so that investments and other transactions are not made clear to the creator of the trust.  In other words, President Trump did not give up access to his own money by setting up the trust; he just gave someone else day to day control over how it is invested.  It would be extraordinary if Trump were unable to take money out when he needed it, and that's all the CBS story really said.

It's the rough equivalent of CBS publishing a story about a scandal that people on the street in front of Trump Tower are now allowed to cross that street when there is a green light for them.  Oh, the horror!

Every time I think that the mainstream media can't get any worse, they nevertheless manage to do so.

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