The Bad Blood Between Rob Reiner and Donald Trump

Actor-director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele, were killed this past week, allegedly by their son, Nick, who was arrested for the crime. It was a horrible thing that no family should have to go through.

President Donald Trump commented on it, but his comment caused a firestorm because, although he termed the killing a “sad thing,” he was critical of Reiner in his remarks.

While many may know that Reiner had a history of posting negative things about Trump on social media, his actions went beyond that. He was actually instrumental in founding something called the Committee to Investigate Russia. According to their website:

The Committee to Investigate Russia is a nonprofit, non-partisan resource provided to help Americans recognize and understand the gravity of Russia’s continuing attacks on our democracy.

The people who were on the advisory board of the committee included former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper; former CIA Director General Michael Hayden; and former acting Director of the CIA Michael Morrell. And if those names sound familiar, as Larry Elder noted in an article at our sister site Hot Air, those are some of the same folks who were part of the Hunter Biden intel letter.

Reiner announced in an interview what the point of the committee was:

“[O]ne-stop shop where people can come and be made aware pop what the breaking news stories are today, the various investigations, what stages they are in, but also to the understand the history, and what the Soviet Union and now Russia has been trying to do for many, many years.” He also said that a goal is to understand “what cyberwarfare is all about.”

The committee put out this video in February 2018, and it is rather stunning to see Reiner with Clapper and the former CIA head John Brennan.

Brennan and Clapper don’t actually talk about anything specific. There was no evidence that any votes were changed from Russia’s alleged hacking efforts.

The committee halted in 2019, following the end of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia collusion, although they have maintained their website.

Reiner made many anti-Trump statements, as Elder noted, including in a Variety interview.

“Donald Trump is the single most unqualified human being to ever assume the presidency of the United States. He is mentally unfit. Not only does he not understand how government works, he has no interest in trying to find out how it works…”

Reiner appeared on MSNBC in October and claimed the country was slipping into an “autocracy” under Trump.

“We have a year before this country becomes a full-on autocracy completely and democracy completely leaves us,” Reiner said. “We have to make the public absolutely aware that their democracy is being taken from them, and we have to do everything we can to make people understand that … if they lose that democracy, all of these [First Amendment rights] will be taken away from them.” [….]

“The Hollywood community is very much aware of their First Amendment rights being impinged. We saw what was happening to Jimmy Kimmel,” Reiner said Sunday. “Our job now as communicators is to start communicating to the rest of the country to let them know what is going to happen to them. The two big things that an autocrat needs is control of the media and military control of the streets.”

So there’s some added context for the bad blood between these two.

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