thanks so much. welcome to the beat. i m ari melber. a we begin with this ongoing and conservative hunt for some kind of evidence or damning narrative about political opponents and how this keeps coming up empty in revealing ways. this is one a those stories that s crested this week because we had the trump era investigation end. i have new material on that, including how it s playing on the right and why that matters. at the same time, house republicans are struggling with their own investigations into the biden family. but it is telling to watch how people are dealing with the evidence this week, especially evident that was channelled but none other than a trump/barr hand picked prosecutor. part of this is playing out on a platform that s been recently discredited. i m talk about fox news, which was caught lying to their own audience and lying so badly and blatantly they were worried they broke illegal lies and they broke history the bad way work a $787 million settleme
already been uncovered or that was new. i see it as really a mixed bag. hmm. and chai, all of this hangs over the public evidence. there may have been a time when bob mueller s sort of harvey dent level excitement by, again, the press and others got excessive. he didn t talk that much, as we know. but the record was that mueller brought cases, he won every case that went to trial, and he brought cases that exposed crimes at the highest level of the trump campaign. and i will say as i reported then, they did not find a conspiracy to work with the russian government. and that was the best news in the end of the mueller probe and report. what they did find was a conspiracy by paul manafort to work with other foreign actors, including those mixed up on other sides of the whole ukraine situation. they did find corruption. they did find tax evasion.
mueller investigation. the report itself, over 300 pages and as the new york times put it, this report from barr s hand picked prosecutor had little new information, failed to reveal the block bester revelations trump had sought. also, to be clear, they re ending with a report and not a bunch of charges. now, the mueller investigation did have a report. it was initially under seal, but you may remember many, many trials and convictions. they don t have that here. there s no new indictments, no referrals, no evidence of improper so, those are the facts. now, what do you do if you re fox news, you have been in trouble for lies, but you now have another story that is not apparently what trump and the allies and maga wanted to hear? well, we re going to show you what they re telling their audience despite the raw truth of what this report found.
broke illegal lies and they broke history the bad way work a $787 million settlement. now some fox hosts with that in mind, that recent body blow, including the ousting of tucker carlson the truth relates to a final report that came out of the trump era attorney general bill barr on the origins of the russia probe. trump had often claimed that the truth would finally come because they put their prosecutor in charge. that s how he put it. that s how he looks at the doj. and he got bill barr to put someone in who they would said unearth the final truth. and the truth is, this report from this trump/barr era prosecutor, who stayed on the job, as you can see, two years plus in the biden president era found, quote, no political bias in how the russia probe was opened and that led to the
they did find problems with michael cohen, which they farmed out to the new york office. we all know what happened there, he went to prison and became a different type of prison against donald trump. what you just described is what factually happened. that is actually what occurred. okay. the problem is his politics is shaped by perception. it s what people believe happened, and literally no time was lapsed between when mueller released the report and bill barr holding that famous press conference where he spun the report and said, nothing to be here, nothing burger, and that became the story. that became sort of the first draft of history by bill barr in that press conference and the media picked it up. trump is playing that same thing here. nothing to see here. i m rated.