President Trump is trying to shift attention away from questions about his administration's alleged ties to Russia, and too many people in media appear happy to help.

The Drudge Report, for example, ran an image from 2003 on its front-page Friday afternoon showing Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., sharing a donut and a cup of coffee with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The headline read, "Schumer and the Russians."



Breitbart News, which has served as an unapologetically pro-Trump web service since his campaign launched in 2015, ran a report Friday titled, "Russian Ambassador Visited Obama at the White House 22 Times."

Elsewhere, Fox News published a graphic that same day listing the "Dem lawmakers" who have met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. (A quick aside: The list of Democratic lawmakers for some reason includes Mary Landrieu. She hasn't held public office since she lost her Senate seat in 2014.)



The problem with these supposed scoops is that they attempt to rebut an argument no one is making in good faith, and now the president himself is parroting these talking points.

We should start an immediate investigation into @SenSchumer and his ties to Russia and Putin. A total hypocrite! pic.twitter.com/Ik3yqjHzsA — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 3, 2017

Just out: The same Russian Ambassador that met Jeff Sessions visited the Obama White House 22 times, and 4 times last year alone. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017



The problem isn't simply that people close to the president spoke with Russian officials during the 2016 election. There's nothing wrong with any senator meeting a Russian diplomat. That's not the real issue.

Rather, the real controversy centers on the circumstances under which people like Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the president's former national security adviser, retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, spoke last year with Russian government officials.

The real Trump controversy is also about Sessions and Flynn failing to disclose these conversations until the truth eventually surfaced in news reports.

There are several legitimate questions that can be asked in this area, especially in regards to Sessions, who was also a campaign surrogate, failing to mention during his confirmation that he spoke with Kislyak at least twice last year.

Even if it was an honest mistake, that's a big thing to omit from one's hearing.

The Russian controversy is about a lot more than simply sharing a donut with Putin, and the White House isn't helping anything by trying to distract with some tit-for-tat gamesmanship.

The Schumer picture, the Fox News graphic and the Breitbart story are poor "gotcha" attempts. It's not about the meetings. It's about circumstances and disclosure.

If right-wing activists want to hit Democrats for hypocrisy over this story, then actually hit them for something comparable. A more thoughtful "gotcha" would be to ding Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., for apparently forgetting this week that they also had meetings with Kislyak.

The Missouri senator said Thursday in a widely shared tweet that she had never "ever" met with the Russian ambassador in her capacity as a member of the Armed Services Committee. This was a very false statement, as National Review's Charles Cooke noted.

On Friday, Pelosi also said she had never met with Kislyak. This was also a very false statement, as reported first by Politico.



In both cases, non-Trump-friendly media uncovered the truth of the matter.

Pelosi and McCaskill have defended their false charges by claiming they meant to say they never had a one-on-one meeting with the Russian ambassador.

Schumer, for his part, responded to Trump's goalpost shifting Friday evening by challenging the president's team to discuss under oath their meetings with Russian officials.