The Washington Post reporter who accused President Trump of calling the Chinese Virus a “hoax” has fessed up and admitted she was wrong.
On Saturday, Amber Phillips said she deleted a tweet that falsely accused the president of the “hoax” line at a campaign rally. Phillips corrected the record after the newspaper’s fact checker published the full text of Trump’s remarks.
End result: Hate-Trump leftists will pay no attention to either Phillips or the fact checker and continue claiming, falsely, that Trump called the virus a hoax.
Corrected Tweet, What Trump Really Said
Phillips’ original falsehood is unavailable, but to her credit, she admitted error as soon as the Post’s Meg Kelly gave a Four-Pinocchio review to a ham-fisted campaign ad from Democrat presidential contender Joe Biden.
“My apologies for quoting the president out of context,” Phillips tweeted. “As The Washington Post’s Fact Checker makes clear, he called Democrats politicizing coronavirus a hoax. I have deleted the incorrect tweet.”
Kelly destroyed Biden’s video lie by quoting Trump at length.
“I’ll be damned if I’m going to lose my country to this man at all,” Biden says to introduce “two clips of the president that meet the Fact Checker’s standards for manipulated video.”
The “deliberately altered” video tells a flat-out lie:
At the 10-second mark, the camera shows a tight shot of the president saying “coronavirus” and then cuts to a wide shot where he says, “this is their new hoax.” Both clips are from Trump’s Feb. 28 campaign rally in North Charleston, S.C., but he never said “coronavirus, this is their new hoax.”
The problem for Sleepy Joe? The actual video and transcript of Trump’s rally.
This is what Trump said:
Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus. You know that, right? Coronavirus. They’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs, you say, ‘How’s President Trump doing?’, ‘Oh, nothing, nothing.’ They have no clue, they don’t have any clue. They can’t even count their votes in Iowa, they can’t even count. No, they can’t. They can’t count their votes. One of my people came up to me and said, ‘Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia.’ That didn’t work out too well. They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. That was on a perfect conversation. They tried anything, they tried it over and over, they’ve been doing it since he got in. It’s all turning, they lost. It’s all turning, think of it, think of it. And this is their new hoax. But you know we did something that’s been pretty amazing. We have 15 people in this massive country and because of the fact that we went early, we went early, we could have had a lot more than that..
Trump’s real claim: Having failed in an attempted coup d’etat with the Russia “collusion” hoax, then the Ukraine phone-call hoax that led to the impeachment, Democrats would pin the blame on him for the Chinese Virus.
But that’s not the worst of it. Trump even clarified his remarks the next day and then again three days after the Biden hit job was released, Kelly noted.
“Hoax” referring to the action that [Democrats] take to try and pin this on somebody, because we’ve done such a good job. The hoax is on them, not — I’m not talking about what’s happening here [the virus]; I’m talking what they’re doing. That’s the hoax…. But the way they refer to it — because these people have done such an incredible job, and I don’t like it when they are criticizing these people. And that’s the hoax. That’s what I’m talking about.
Whatever Trump’s real or imagined sins in handling the Chinese Virus pandemic, “that does not excuse this kind of video manipulation,” Kelly wrote. “This is a clear example of deceptive editing…. It edits out large portions of a video but still presents it as a complete narrative.”
Kelly dissected other manipulated video, then duly recorded the reason for the lie from Biden’s information ministry: “Donald Trump is the most dishonest president in American history and one of the least credible human beings in the world.”
In other words, Trump lies, and so will we, even if it means lying during a national crisis.
H/T: Washington Examiner
Photo: AP Images
R. Cort Kirkwood is a long-time contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor
