During a Saturday morning interview on Fox & Friends, former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski was asked how he thinks news special counsel Robert Mueller has filed his first charges is being received in the White House.
Lewandowski, who was part of the campaign when Donald Trump Jr. sent his infamous June 2016 email to a Kremlin-connected lawyer expressing excitement about colluding, responded by insisting that what’s needed is new scrutiny of the nonexistent “Clinton administration.”
“Look, the speculation is so insane right now,” Lewandowski said. “What we should be focusing on are the continued lies of the Clinton administration — the continued fallacies that they perpetuated.”
That wasn’t the only time during the interview that Lewandowski indulged himself in the fiction that Clinton is actually president. Later, he again referred to “the Clinton administration” while attempting to gin up controversy surrounding the so-called Uranium One scandal — a long-discredited conspiracy theory that Trump supporters have nonetheless started recirculating in recent days.
As news swirled on Friday evening that Mueller had filed the first charges related to his investigation into the Trump campaign for possible collusion with Russia, Trump supporters did their best to take the heat off Trump and put it back on the Clintons.
This was evident on Fox News, where host Jeanine Pirro went as far as to call for Mueller’s dismissal even as other networks covered his newly-filed charges.
Jeanine Pirro on the Mueller investigation: "Time to shut it down." pic.twitter.com/l0G1Ke9kaC
— Max Tani (@maxwelltani) October 28, 2017
This strategy — distract from Trump’s scandals by desperately trying to create new ones surrounding the Clintons — isn’t new. But the effort has intensified in recent days. For instance, during an interview on Thursday’s edition of Hannity, former White House deputy assistant to the president Sebastian Gorka went as far as to suggest that Hillary Clinton deserves to be tried for treason and executed for her role in the Uranium One deal, despite there being no evidence she actually did anything wrong.
Congressional Republicans have been complicit in manufacturing pseudo-scandals. On Tuesday, House Intelligence Committee Chair Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) announced his committee is launching a new investigation into Clinton and Uranium One. His announcement came less than a week after President Trump insisted it should receive more scrutiny.
Uranium deal to Russia, with Clinton help and Obama Administration knowledge, is the biggest story that Fake Media doesn't want to follow!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 19, 2017
Nunes’ announcement comes while the Trump administration refuses to implement new sanctions against Russia that Congress approved in July, for reasons White House officials refuse to disclose. But instead of looking into that or other matters of concern involving the current president, Trump supporters like Lewandowski and Nunes are indulging in the convenient fiction that they still have a Democratic president to scandal-monger about.