Trump was falsely accused of clearing protesters so that he could pose outside St. John’s Church.
Welcome back to “Forgotten Fact-Checks,” a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week we have the media’s false assumptions on the alleged Trump-St. John’s Church photo-op debacle, Twitter’s seemingly ever-changing hacked materials policy, the return of Jeffrey Toobin, and more media misses.
You Know What Happens When You Assume . . .
Last summer, the incident in which federal officers allegedly cleared peaceful Black Lives Matter demonstrators from Lafayette Park so then-President Trump could have a photo-op at St. John’s Church became, for many, a stark example of why protest against law enforcement and government was needed in the first place.
However, a new report issued last week by Department of the Interior inspector general Mark Greenblatt found that the federal Park Police issued the order to clear the park hours before anyone knew Trump planned to visit the church. While Greenblatt found that Attorney General Bill Barr ordered the clearing expedited once he learned that Trump would be walking over to the church, Trump’s visit was not the reason for the park being cleared in the first place.
Rather than the neat narrative that Democrats and protestors crafted, the park was cleared in order to install anti-scale fencing, which went up days after at least 49 U.S. Park Police were injured in riots.
Politicians, journalists, and media outlets alike ran with the story based on nothing more than the appearance of impropriety.
“Tear-gassing peaceful protestors without provocation just so that the President could pose for photos outside a church dishonors every value that faith teaches us,” House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) and then–Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) said in a statement at the time.
Then-Senator Kamala Harris blasted Trump, saying she watched as the then-president “gassed peaceful protesters just so he could do this photo op, then he went on to teargas priests who were helping protesters in Lafayette Park.
NPR’s take? “Peaceful Protesters Tear-Gassed to Clear Way For Trump Church Photo-Op.” And from the New York Times: “Protesters Dispersed With Tear Gas So Trump Could Pose At Church.”
USA Today claimed that the White House “forcibly clear[ed] protesters from a park in front of the White House, so Trump could walk across the street and pose with a Bible in front of a historic church.”
CNN correspondent Jim Acosta said at a briefing that the White House had “gassed and pummeled protesters” so Trump could have his photo taken. Meanwhile, MSNBC anchor Joy Reid said the incident happened so Trump could have his picture taken with a Bible. CNN’s Anderson Cooper similarly said it “obviously” happened on Trump’s behalf.
Even CNN’s so-called fact-checker Daniel Dale defended the narrative months later, when he said in February that “they cleared peaceful protesters out of the way for a Trump photo-op” and anything to the contrary was false.
The Mysterious Case of Twitter’s Disappearing Hacked Materials Policy
As the Daily Caller first noted last week, Twitter took no action against tweets involving a ProPublica story published Tuesday based on the “illegal” leak of confidential tax information of America’s wealthiest people.
While both White House press secretary Jen Psaki and a spokeswoman for the Treasury Department said the unauthorized disclosure of tax records to the media outlet was “illegal,” Twitter did not move to restrict sharing of the article on its platform as it did with a New York Post article about Hunter Biden’s laptop ahead of the 2020 election.
Twitter said it blocked users from sharing the Hunter Biden story for violating its Hacked Materials Policy, though there was no evidence that the Post obtained the laptop as a result of a hack.
While ProPublica did not say how it came to be in the possession of 15 years of tax returns for thousands of America’s wealthiest people, the Wall Street Journal suggested that it was either from a source within the IRS or a hack.
Twitter defines hacked materials as any information “accessed legitimately outside of approved systems or networks,” or any materials “where there is evidence that they were obtained through malware or social engineering.”
-Meanwhile, the social-media site also did not censor news stories covering hacked materials related to people who donated to Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse’s legal defense fund in April.
“Tweets referring to a hack or discussing hacked materials would not be considered a violation of this policy unless materials associated with the hack are directly distributed in the text of a Tweet, in an image shared on Twitter, or in links to hacked content hosted on other websites,” a Twitter spokesperson told the Daily Caller at the time.
Headline Fail of the Week
Time magazine revealed its cover for the week beginning June 21, to the amusement of those who have been paying any attention at all to the Biden administration’s approach to handling Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Biden takes on Putin https://t.co/8o1tsTV7LD pic.twitter.com/TQGYoSYDF6
— TIME (@TIME) June 11, 2021
President Biden is “Taking on Putin” by granting waivers for the dictator’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline into Western Europe? Such a decision by the Trump administration would have been followed by the gnashing of teeth and a not-so-fresh Jonathan Chait column about how Trump had been working for the KGB since the Eighties. With a Democrat in the White House, it scores the president an aviator sunglasses-clad cover profile about his resolve.
Media Misses
-CNN last week inexplicably chose to offer Jeffrey Toobin, its chief legal analyst, a second chance after he exposed himself during a Zoom video call with former colleagues from the New Yorker. Though the magazine fired Toobin after he masturbated while accidentally leaving the camera on during the call in October, CNN chose not to fire him. He instead took a leave of absence from the network before returning on Thursday.
He called his actions “deeply moronic and indefensible” and said he has spent the time since “trying to be a better person. In therapy, trying to do some public service, working in a food bank, working on a new book. I am trying to become the kind of person that people can trust again.”
He said he found the New Yorker firing “excessive punishment” but “that’s why they don’t ask the criminal to be the judge in his own case.”
A CNN executive, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Washington Post, “I don’t think that one terrible mistake should define a person or ruin their employment opportunities for life.”
The latest controversy comes after the network came under fire in recent weeks for allowing Chris Cuomo to keep his job at the network even after it was revealed that he violated journalistic ethics in helping his brother, New York governor Andrew Cuomo, through a sexual-harassment scandal.
– MSNBC host Joy Reid set Twitter ablaze on Friday after she defended critical race theory and claimed that children are currently being taught “a kind of Confederate Race Theory.”
“Currently, most k-12 students already learn a kind of Confederate Race Theory, whereby the Daughters of the Confederacy long ago imposed a version of history wherein slavery was not so bad and had nothing to do with the civil war, and lynchings and violence never happened,” she wrote in a tweet.
"Most"? This is nonsense. Nobody in my family, of any generation, has ever been taught anything vaguely resembling this. In how many of the 50 states, in 2021 A.D., do you believe that the Daughters of the Confederacy presently control the public, private, & parochial schools? https://t.co/Z9qdqiq31D
— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) June 12, 2021
A number of prominent conservatives and Twitter users fired back, including NR’s Dan McLaughlin who replied: “‘Most’? This is nonsense. Nobody in my family, of any generation, has ever been taught anything vaguely resembling this. In how many of the 50 states, in 2021 A.D., do you believe that the Daughters of the Confederacy presently control the public, private, & parochial schools?”