Abby Huntsman Confronts Rachel Maddow: Aren’t You ‘Part of the Problem?’ – By Matt Wilstein (Daily Beast) / Oct 3 2019
“The View” host accused Rachel Maddow of creating a situation where the American people “don’t believe anything anymore” about Trump.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow brought her media tour to promote her new book Blowout about corruption in the oil and gas industry to The View on Thursday, but just like Stephen Colbert earlier in the week, all the hosts really wanted to talk about was Trump’s impeachment inquiry.
Maddow continued to predict that Trump will be impeached over his phone call with the Ukrainian president and this time suggested that the scandal could bring down Vice President Mike Pence as well.
Referring to a new report from The Washington Post, Maddow said, “Pence basically did it too.” She explained that after Trump’s call, the vice president traveled in person to Ukraine to tell President Zelensky, “You’re not getting any military aid, and we need you to do those investigations” into the Bidens, “which is exactly what Trump is going to be impeached for.”
“Telling another country to help us in the election is both illegal and impeachable,” Maddow said. “But making it contingent on military aid is that much worse. Pence appears to have been the guy to connect those things explicitly to the president.”
When Maddow suggested that Pence could be “impeached too,” Joy Behar chimed in with, “Then it’s President Nancy Pelosi!”
“With all due respect, that’s a true fever dream of yours, Joy,” Meghan McCain replied, before pivoting to try to get Maddow to agree that House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) “muddied the waters” on impeachment by saying he had not been in direct contact with the whistleblower when that wasn’t entirely accurate.
Maddow wasn’t having it, telling McCain, “I feel like this focus on who the whistleblower is and how his complaint was handled, both by the Republicans and Democrats, is a side story.” She also pushed back on the notion that Schiff is a “partisan,” arguing, “He actually was reticent on impeachment. As the head of the intelligence committee, he has been very much in the public eye on this, but not one of the people pushing for impeachment.”
McCain’s attempts to draw conflict with Maddow were nothing, however, compared to what Abby Huntsman asked her next.
“I think the Ukraine call, that to me, is very clear cut of an abuse of power,” Huntsman said. “And my frustration is that there has been a ‘crying wolf’ for so long. ‘This is it, this is the smoking gun, he’s out,’ for two years now from Democrats, from some members of the media, that now you have people in this country that are, like, we don’t believe anything anymore. They’re shutting it off. They are not taking it as seriously as they should, and I ask you, do you think you’re part of that problem?”
“Rachel?!” Behar asked in disbelief.
“I think it’s a really good point,” Maddow answered as Huntsman started to backtrack a bit by saying “we’re all guilty” as members of the media. “But it’s a consequence of having a really scandal-ridden presidency with all sorts of stuff that happens all the time, that in any other presidency, would have already led to impeachment.”
In the final moments of Maddow’s second segment with the crew, Huntsman turned to their guest and said, “By the way, Rachel, my dad’s not the whistleblower,” referring to her father Jon Huntsman, who as of today is no longer Trump’s ambassador to Russia.
