Senate Intel chair Richard Burr tries to control the damage over Natasha Bertrand’s piece in Politico today. (BLUF: Burr isn’t good at this. At. All.)
We need more details about this, but it sure sounds like Burr is attempting to do damage control for Rs in response to .@NatashaBertrand’s piece in Politico earlier today. 1/8
Bertrand’s blockbuster is hugely damaging to the whole Trumpian attempted counter-narrative about Trump-Russia and Trump-Ukraine, and also a huge embarrassment to the likes of Sens. Kennedy and Johnson, b/c they must have been aware of the committee’s conclusions all along.. 2/8
It was totally predictable that Burr would be under pressure to throw shade on his *own committee’s report* for this reason, but his answers to NBC News are as inept as they are shameful.
(Note that Bertrand’s article came out 5 hours ago; Thorp tweeted 3 hours ago.) 3/8
As to the first, Burr is a total nitwit if he thinks that his answers to Frank Thorp’s questions are going to survive scrutiny. 4/8
From Bertrand’s article: 5/8
Bertrand cites a number of Senate Intel Committee members who backed up her story, though they were reluctant to give details because the investigation remains classified. (That is why Bertrand had to cite anonymous sources who had “direct knowledge”… etc.) 6/8
But this story has legs, and Ds are going to leak as much as they have to in order to defeat Burr’s Mickey Mouse effort to blunt Bertrand’s blockbuster story. 7/8
What Burr said is also *shameful,* b/c it is based on utterly specious false equivalences — all the product of a Russian disinformation campaign.
To see just how shameful and shoddy Burr is here, read @SethAbramson’s thread on the matter, which I will be retweeting next. 8/8
PS1/ Distilling Burr’s “argument,” it goes like this:
At its “oranges,” the Trump-Russia investigation began with allegations that Putin preferred Trump to Clinton. (This of course is nonsense: there was a LOT more to it than this from the very beginning.)
PS2/ Using this utterly false premise, Burr reaches the conclusion that investigating allegations of Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election now is equally warranted, because we know that prominent Ukrainians preferred Clinton to Trump in 2016!
PS3/ And all this nonsense despite the fact that his own committee investigated the allegations about Ukrainian interference and found there was nothing to it! — as will become clear when Bertrand’s story gets confirmed.
Go figure.
Rs get dumber and more desperate by the day.
