House Republicans have released a report attempting to rebut the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump — revealing a patchwork of spin, distortions, and outright denials of reality. But more than that, the document echoes the talking points that Fox News has made throughout the entire Trump-Ukraine scandal.
From the start, of course, this story has been laundered from Fox News into Trump’s brain, beginning with the smear campaigns against Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, and other figures who have been caught up in the presidential scandal. Indeed, many of this new document’s purportedly factual (but easily debunked) claims about the impeachment inquiry can also be found in Fox host Sean Hannity’s recent “e-book” guide for talking to relatives over the holidays — though what Hannity wrote in just two-and-a-half pages, House Republicans stretched out to 123 pages.
Fundamentally, the House GOP report engages in Fox’s tried-and-true strategy of constructing an alternate reality in which the impeachment witnesses are said to have proved the exact opposite of what they actually testified about, such as claiming that “none of the Democrats’ witnesses testified to having evidence of bribery, extortion, or any high crime or misdemeanor,” even after multiple people laid out in detail the Trump administration’s quid pro quo demand that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky investigate the Bidens. (And yet still, the report claims: “The evidence does not establish that President Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate Burisma Holdings, Vice President Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, or Ukrainian influence in the 2016 election for the purpose of benefiting him in the 2020 election.”)