Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) on Tuesday blasted the media for their coverage of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, saying they are more focused on punditry than reporting.
Cotton appeared on the Hugh Hewitt Show, where he was asked how the media should correct their coverage of political issues, prompting the Arkansas senator to say they need to "focus on the facts."
"It would be much more helpful if they would focus on reporting facts and running those facts through editors that they can verify with on-the-record sources or documentary evidence rather than the rampant treatment of anonymous sources who are given anonymity for no other reason than they want to attack a president that they don't like," Cotton said. "And furthermore, I would say it would probably help them, too, if they focused a little more on news and less on spin and punditry and analysis."
He admitted that he isn't a big "cable news consumer," but said that he walks back and forth through his offices all the time and notices the size of the panels.
"It seems like every time I walk by a TV, there's a panel with five or seven or nine or twelve failed politicians or failed operatives opining rather than reporting," Cotton said.
Cotton later said it is a "new day" in the Trump presidency and that he can now focus on the next 19 months before the 2020 election by reflecting on the "last two years of economic growth, wage growth for working-class Americans, our military rebuild, and many other bright signs that have come from the last two years."
"Do you agree with Lindsey Graham and me, for that matter, that we need a special counsel, though not necessarily one appointed pursuant to the regulations which do not govern this, to look into the conduct of the FBI and the intelligence community in 2016 concerning the FISA process?" Hewitt asked.
"I think we need more scrutiny for sure, Hugh, now that this investigation is behind us, into exactly how it is that so many Obama officials and senior officials in the FBI came to believe that an American presidential campaign was colluding with a foreign intelligence service to include some potential instances of intelligence laws and the FBI’s investigatory power," Cotton said.
Mueller determined Trump did not collude with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign, but he refrained from making a judgment on whether Trump attempted to impede the investigation.
"The Special Counsel's investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election," Barr wrote in a letter to Congress. "As the report states, ‘[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.'"
Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein found there was "not sufficient evidence to establish the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense."