Liars, Leakers, and Liberals

CHAPTER TWO

Lying, Liberal Fake News and Fiction

When it comes to politics, I’ve been around. I’ve won four elections and lost one. While doing so, I’ve had my share of good press, bad press, and blatantly untrue and unfair press. But in my four decades in law enforcement, politics, and television, I’ve never seen anything like the way the media treats President Trump.

It’s one thing to publish slanted, misleading, or demonstrably false stories during a presidential campaign. It’s another to publish lies. The media outdid themselves in that respect during the 2016 election. And, it didn’t end with the election. Can you remember the last time the media continued vilifying the winner of a presidential election after an inauguration with as much negative coverage as Donald Trump has endured?

No, of course you can’t, because the media’s treatment of President Trump is unprecedented. The LIBERAL press didn’t like George W. Bush. It despised Richard Nixon. But nothing the media wrote or said about either of them compares to the unabashed hatred they’ve displayed toward Donald Trump. Forget the customary honeymoon the media usually give presidents during their first hundred days; Donald Trump wasn’t given even a hundred hours. As Kellyanne Conway put it, “We are well beyond describing the bent as ‘liberal’ or ‘biased.’ They are chasing stories that don’t matter to most of America.”

A year and a half later, they haven’t relented, not even a little. At the 2018 White House Correspondents’ Dinner (a tradition going back almost a hundred years), President Trump, and anyone associated with him, was assaulted with hateful remarks by whiny-voiced Michelle Wolf. Now, don’t get me wrong, I have attended several of these dinners and understand part of the tradition is some good-natured ribbing of the president and his administration. No one likes a well-delivered jab better than I do.

Let’s be honest. There was a marked difference between the “jokes” made by Michelle Wolf about the president, Kellyanne Conway and, especially, Sarah Sanders, and the ribbing directed at President Obama or any of his predecessors. Wolf’s comments were way over the line of even edgy comedy. Can you imagine if a conservative guest speaker insulted Susan Rice’s or Michelle Obama’s appearance, even as part of a supposed comedy routine? Apparently, liberals have no problem with such treatment of a woman, as long as she is in some way connected to Donald Trump.

Worst of all, Wolf wasn’t remotely funny. Her hatred of the president completely short-circuited her talent as a comedian. Instead of witty barbs, she produced nothing but shrill invective. Even if her target had been a president I didn’t support, it would have been equally cringe-worthy for me.

One of the most hypocritical moments in Wolf’s embarrassing diatribe was her lame joke lead-in, “And I know as much as some of you might want me to, it’s 2018 and I am a woman, so you cannot shut me up.” She should have said, “I’m a liberal woman, so you cannot shut me up,” because, like mocking their physical appearance, the Left sees nothing wrong with “shutting up” conservative women. And they’re perfectly willing to use violence to do so.

Street Injustice

I have a segment on my Fox News show, Justice with Judge Jeanine, called “Street Justice.” I go out onto the street with a cameraman, a producer, and, of course, security, to try to get people to answer some questions. It’s all in good fun; we try to have a few laughs.

Usually, I stick close to Fox News headquarters, but sometimes we travel around. Recently, I went down toward lower Manhattan, to a park very close to New York University. We got a few people to stop and got great, funny footage, until some nut jobs in the park realized who I was. Every time I started talking to someone on camera, those guys would scream as loud as they could. “FOX NEWS! FAKE NEWS! EFF TRUMP! GRAB HER BLEEP [a reference to the female anatomy]!”

The eyes in the back of my head were on full alert. They were so aggressive and angry I thought one of them was going to hit me with a bottle he was carrying.

But there was one kid, a student, who was also following me that day. “I’m a conservative, but I don’t dare say anything, because it will affect my friendships and my grades,” he said. I tried to talk to him, but then he screamed, yelled, and jumped in front of the camera to fit in with the others. He was too scared, I guess, to let anyone know how he truly felt.

The Trump campaign experienced the same as this kid and I did, but much worse. “Well, it’s the ‘free speech for me but not for thee’ mentality that’s always on the left,” Don Jr. told me. “It’s the do as I say, not as I do thing. Listen, I think what we learned from this election is that they are the greatest hypocrites in the history of hypocrisy. All the things that they said, ‘This is what the evil Trump supporters are going to do,’ they’re doing it in droves.”

My crew ended up packing and leaving. As we rode back to Fox, I was stunned. Those clowns had no respect for the First Amendment. It was a public park. I had every right to be there. They treated me like I’m a fascist, yet they were the ones trying to deny me my free speech.

That’s the Left today. And don’t tell me for one minute that Antifa and the women’s marches are not supported by George Soros—a socialist with an agenda to destroy this country and the capitalist system.

For too long, people on the Right have allowed this to happen. Rather than get our hands dirty fighting such fights, conservatives have ignored the Left’s violent rhetoric. I don’t know anyone on the Right today who would try to do what those people outside NYU did to me. Not a single one.

The Fake News Awards

Not only does this all-consuming hatred for Donald Trump render comedians not funny, it has rendered the news media virtually incapable of reporting basic facts. The lies were so outrageous during Trump’s first year in office that he created the Fake News Awards. It was a somewhat tongue-in-cheek move that injected some much-needed humor into the poisonous political atmosphere, but each award was richly deserved.

First prize went to Paul Krugman, who predicted, in the opinion pages of the New York Times, that the stock market would plummet and then “never recover” from the election of Donald Trump;¹ this from a Nobel prize–winning economist! I’ve often wondered how people like him can become so blinded by their hatred of Donald Trump that they forget decades of training in their chosen fields. Krugman, a renowned economist, is not a moron.

Second prize went to ABC’s Brian Ross, whose “investigative” unit at ABC did some Inspector Clouseau–level investigating when it ran a story² that Michael Flynn was prepared to testify against the president, alleging he had personally directed Flynn to contact Russia before the election. That was a lie. The request by the president occurred after the election and was completely proper.

The story was false. It was poorly sourced and involved about as much investigative journalism as a tabloid gossip column. Like everyone else in the media, Ross, a previously well-respected, award-winning reporter, allowed his hatred of Donald Trump to cloud his judgment. ABC News retracted the story the next day³ and eventually demoted Ross.⁴ It was a demotion well deserved.

The bronze medalist was my personal favorite. The team over at CNN published a story alleging members of Trump’s campaign had intimate ties with people at WikiLeaks.⁵

Those knuckleheads managed to convince their editors the Trump campaign had plotted to coordinate the release of stolen emails to damage Hillary Clinton. Specifically, it erroneously reported the Trump campaign received an email from WikiLeaks giving the campaign access to the Clinton emails on September 4, 2016, before the emails were made public. The Trump campaign did not have any advance access nor, more importantly, a relationship with WikiLeaks.

The email from WikiLeaks to the Trump campaign was actually sent on September 14th, the day after WikiLeaks had published the Clinton emails, which CNN’s online version of the story now acknowledges. To add insult to injury, the Clinton News Network suffered the indignity of being corrected by fellow Fake News outlet the Washington Post.⁶

It’s not as if Donald Trump had needed any help from WikiLeaks in the first place. WikiLeaks only confirmed what everyone ostensibly knew. In addition to being crooked, Hillary was a hypocritical oligarch who largely had contempt for her deluded supporters. All the emails did was confirm that.

Fake news is profitable to CNN. I get it. Without Trump, CNN would be suffering a deficit rather than a Trump-fueled cash infusion.

The Fake News Awards list goes all the way to eleven, but you get the idea. The press in America has become the public relations arm of the Democrat Party, which is so blinded by rage for its loss of the White House and Congress that it will stop at nothing to cook up a negative story about Donald Trump, with no regard for truth.

One of the chief differences between President Trump and other presidents is his transparency. He doesn’t hide behind political correctness. He doesn’t spout two-faced double-talk. He’s just a hard-nosed, what-you-see-is-what-you-get successful businessman and negotiator. Rather than applaud him, the so-called Resistance, including its Fake News mouthpiece, would rather take him down, sacrificing our economic success and international strength for the sake of their agenda. They would rather see America fail than see Donald Trump succeed.

It is shocking, for example, that in the week that North Korea announced, as a precondition to meeting with the president, it would shut down its nuclear testing, the press coverage of Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels was wall-to-wall. They get a search warrant for Trump’s lawyer’s office, but HRC (Her Royal Clinton) doesn’t even get a subpoena. Instead, she gets a heads-up that “it’s time to destroy” the evidence of her crimes. And rather than applaud the president for what no other president had accomplished, the media relegated the story to secondary reporting. It didn’t matter that so many Americans were able to breathe a sigh of relief, or that a war seemed to have been averted.

On Friday, April 13, 2018, McClatchy reported that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had evidence the president’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen, had in fact traveled to Prague in 2016, as the Steele dossier alleged, for a meeting with Putin agents. The Mueller team had to put out a statement that said in part: “Be very cautious about any source that claims to have knowledge about our investigation and dig deep into what they claim before reporting on it. If another outlet reports something, don’t run with it unless you have your own sourcing to back it up.”

This hatred is all consuming and puts the security of our country in danger. Regardless of the damage they do to our country, its institutions, and its traditions of freedom, these LIARS, LEAKERS, and LIBERALS are determined to sabotage the Trump presidency.

The very same publications that used to call President Trump when he was a real estate mogul now stop at nothing to make him look bad. Gone are the days when they would cover both sides of an issue or call anyone—let alone their old pal Donald Trump—for a fair, on-the-record quote. They twist words and play with facts until the American people can’t tell what’s true anymore. Fake News reporters don’t need to interview people on the record anymore, because their sources can all be anonymous. There’s no longer any accountability for what they say, because names will never be attached to anything.

As of this writing, the lies haven’t stopped. There was a time when the press would self-reproach for publishing inaccurate information. Today, the media’s strategy is if you repeat something often enough, people will believe it is true. That includes telling you LYING, LEAKING James Comey is some kind of hero, instead of the politically-motivated weasel he appears to be to anyone with any grip on reality. More on “Cardinal” Comey later.

Doubling Down on Dishonesty

A favorite narrative of the Left says the White House is in chaos. I have been in the White House on several occasions. Based on these crazy reports, I expected to see people hanging from chandeliers and vomiting or hiding under their desks.

In March, with this anticipated scene in mind, I sat down with Chief of Staff John Kelly, who completely refuted the media’s representation of the White House as “chaotic.”⁷ Suffice it to say both the general’s remarks and my firsthand observations in the West Wing confirm the reports are demonstrably false.

Even more egregious is the media’s characterization of the Robert Mueller investigation. The president rightly calls this fiasco a “witch hunt,” while the media would have you believe that any day it will conclusively prove the outlandish Russiagate conspiracy theory to be true. Headline after headline uses the words “closing in” to describe the special counsel’s progress.

The Russia collusion investigation is over. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced that himself, for all intents and purposes, when he indicted thirteen Russians for interfering in the election and said explicitly that no Americans had been knowingly involved.⁸ That means neither Donald Trump nor any of his campaign team was involved, as they are all Americans.