Bill Maher Resorts to Cheap, Classless, Ignorant Stunt

HBO’s Bill Maher has been good to me over the years, showing a professional and personal courtesy. I’ve always been impressed by how hard he and his staff work to make sure they put together a balanced, interesting current events show during volatile times, with Bill himself trying to keep a sense of humor and an open mind about most every subject.

Except one: Russiagate. Bill so far hasn’t suffered the fate of someone like Stephen Colbert because Bill has remained a comic at heart through all these years, while Colbert gave up being funny to become an establishment mouthpiece. The flip side of that equation, though, is that when a subject gets too weedsy or difficult, Bill glibs his way through the hard parts and uses his host’s prerogative to bully guests by cutting them off after scripted laughs. He used my friend Walter Kirn as a prop for this act Friday night. If it’d been me in that chair, I might have pulled his arms off:

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One moment stood out. Bill gave a little speech about how Tulsi Gabbard accusing former intelligence officials and Barack Obama of a “treasonous conspiracy” was “rich,” then sounded off on whether or not Russiagate is a “nothingburger.” It sounded like he was talking about me here:

It has astonished me for quite a while that a lot of people — not just on the right, but people sort of in the middle — have been saying for a very long time now that Russiagate was a nothingburger. I think it makes them feel like “I was the smart one, I’ve said that all along. Russiagate was not a nothingburger. It was a burger. Maybe it wasn’t a juicy steak. But it was a burger. I would like to show you one little piece of tape, and then we can talk about it…

Then he did something amazing, rolling out tape of a joint press conference from July 16, 2018, when Reuters reporter Jeff Mason asked a question, and Vladimir Putin after a pause to hear the translation, answered:

MASON: President Putin, did you want President Trump to win the election. And did you direct any of your officials to help him do that?

PUTIN: Yes, I did. Yes, I did. Because he talked about bringing the U.S.-Russia relationship back to normal.

At this, Bill threw his hands up in the air, as if to say, “Who’s smart now?”

I watched the Trump-Putin presser in “real time” and remember it well. I speak Russian and could hear the sense of Putin’s answers in addition to the translation. This snippet at the end was carefully phrased by Mason, who was hoping “I might just get one more in” after multiple attempts at the same collusion-themed question. Bill’s staff left out these prior exchanges between Mason, Trump, and Putin, which were definitive, even strident on these questions. Mason for instance asked Trump if he could please say something negative about Russia for a change:

MASON: Thank you. Mr. President, you tweeted this morning that it’s U.S. foolishness, stupidity and the Mueller probe that is responsible for the decline in U.S. relations with Russia. Do you hold Russia at all accountable for anything in particular? And if so, what would you — what would you consider them — that they are responsible for?

Trump replied:

TRUMP: Yes I do. I hold both countries responsible. I think that the United States has been foolish. I think we’ve all been foolish. We should’ve had this dialogue a long time ago; a long time, frankly, before I got to office… The probe is a disaster for our country… There was no collusion at all. Everybody knows it… That was a clean campaign. I beat Hillary Clinton easily. And, frankly, we beat her — and I’m not even saying from the standpoint — we won that race. And it’s a shame that there could even be a little bit of a cloud over it. People know that, people understand it. But the main thing… zero collusion.

Having accomplished the goal of setting up a “Trump Backs Putin on Election Meddling at Summit” story that would be packed with quotes from the likes of John Brennan denouncing the summit as “treasonous,” Mason moved on to Putin. He asked the Russian president why Americans shouldn’t believe their intelligence agencies over Donald Trump:

MASON: For President Putin, if I could follow up as well, why should Americans and why should President Trump believe your statement that Russia did not intervene in the 2016 election, given the evidence that U.S. intelligence agencies have provided? And will you consider extraditing the 12 Russian officials that were indicted last week by a U.S. grand jury?

Trump interrupted to repeat the “no collusion” line a few times, but Putin eventually did get to answer. He responded not only to the conspiracy question, but also addressing the much-ballyhooed indictment of 12 GRU officers along with two companies, Concord Management and Concord Consulting:

PUTIN: Could you name a single fact that would definitely prove the collusion? This is utter nonsense, just like the President recently mentioned… We heard the accusations about the Concord company. Well, as far as I know, this company hired American lawyers and the accusations don’t have a fighting chance in the American courts. So there’s no evidence when it comes to the actual facts.

When Jonathan LeMire of AP challenged Trump by saying, “Every intelligence agency has concluded” that Russia interfered, and why didn’t he just agree, Trump rambled for a while before Putin asked to step in. “I was an intelligence officer myself, and I do know how dossiers are made up,” he seethed. When LeMire shot back by asking if Russia had “compromising material” on Trump, Putin became frustrated. “Now to the compromising material. Yes, I heard these rumors that we allegedly collected compromising material on Mr. Trump,” he snapped. “Well, distinguished colleague, let me tell you this: When President Trump was at Moscow back then, I didn’t even know that he was in Moscow.”

Putin’s answers were so unequivocal, LeMire himself summarized it in one of his questions, saying, “Just now, President Putin denied having anything to do with the election interference in 2016.”

Going back to the clip Bill played for the latest show, Mason asked a two-part question: “Did you want President Trump to win the election, and did you direct any of your officials to help him do that?” Putin’s answer, “Yes, I did,” was clearly in reference to the first part only, among other things because his translator was speaking during the first part. But don’t take my word for it. Ask Jeff Mason, the Reuters reporter who went all the way to Helsinki to ask dogshit CIA-themed gotcha questions and still couldn’t lie about the answer he got. In an interview with NPR two days later, he said:

I think if you look critically at it and, in particular, listen to what he was saying earlier, he as well as President Trump were denying any kind of collusion. So my suspicion is he heard the first part of my question and may not have heard the second part.

To recap: at a press conference in which both Putin and Trump were subject to a stream of questions about interference and collusion and both repeatedly answered with firm denials, a Reuters reporter asked a two-part question that inspired a brief answer to the second part in complete contradiction with the others, seemingly because Putin didn’t hear the question. The reporter himself, citing those denials, admitted his “suspicion” is that Putin didn’t hear the second part. Seven years later, after every other element of this preposterous WMD-style con job has been exposed, Bill Maher rolls out “Yes, I did” as a smoking gun confession. Holy shit is that weak.

There is subtext to this exchange. Not only did Bill years ago milk the Helsinki summit for boatloads of jokes about Trump being a “Russian ho” and how what Russia did wasn’t meddling, just “white people helping white people,” he invited ex-CIA Director and drone-torture-perjury officianado John Brennan as a guest to comment on all this, in August of 2018. Instead of even gently challenging the former CIA chief who happened to be a central character in the Russiagate story, Bill wrapped his lips all the way around Brennan’s saggy glutes and declared anyone who didn’t defer to “our generals” was guilty of treason. “He’s not on our side. You’re not on our side, if you’re attacking our Generals, you’re not on our side,” Bill said, adding, “He takes their side and not ours. That’s a traitor.”

Now that it’s been revealed Brennan specifically lied to Congress about these issues and overrode his own hand-picked analysts to include discarded reports and the bogus Steele Dossier in the secret case against Trump because it “rings true,” Bill’s decision to throw treason charges at anyone who disagreed with the man looks pretty bad. That’s in addition to the dozens of other shows in which Bill embraced stories that later went belly up, factually.

Bill’s ball-gargling of Brennan looks particularly weak considering a February, 2020 routine in which he counseled Democrats to fight dirtier, just like the Republicans. Watch how he grew somber and self-righteous as he talked about the scourge of deep-fake videos before joking, “It’s the future of sleazy American political advertising, so let’s get in on it now and I know I know just what our first deep fake video should be the pee tape.” Then, for laughs, he played a deep-fake “pee tape” video that ended with the line, “I’m Donald Trump, I like everything covered in gold, earning applause and plenty of attaboys on social media.

Bill didn’t get, or maybe he did, that “the future of sleazy American political advertising” was cheap-ass videos but a sophisticated cross-institutional mechanism in which intelligence services, law enforcement, Congressional Committees, and the corporate press work in sync to make more lasting fakes. Those are stories that despite being wholly invented are deemed true by everyone from “authoritative” fact-checking organizations to unscrupulous Reuters reporters to the Pulitzer Committee to late night comics like Colbert and Maher himself. Crude videos are small beer compared to these blatant, institutionally supported intelligence deceptions. Did I mention Bill gulped to the shaft when he interviewed the guy who put the stamp of the United States on the actual pee tape by sticking it an official government report?

In hindsight, Real Time’s failure to remind their audience they have a stake in leaving out all this context is pretty rich, isn’t it?