You might think that the fact-checkers would go after the Biden team for the huge whopper they told: blaming the Republicans for “defunding the police” because they didn’t vote for Biden’s boondoggle American Rescue Plan.
But if you’ve been following along, you know better.
Of course, it’s been Democrats who have been calling for defunding the police, including in Democratic cities across the country, in large measure because of the pressure from the BLM movement.
Moreover, the boondoggle bill didn’t even have specified money for police in the bill, although it did have general money allocated to the state and local governments. So the Republicans couldn’t be voting against “defunding the police.” Plus, not voting for a bloated Democratic bill is not the same as “defunding.”
For a whole year, Democrats have been behind the defunding movement — from members of Congress like Rep. Ilan Omar (D-MN), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) all calling for defunding to local Democrats as well in cities like Seattle, Portland, and New York.
But the Biden team wants to pretend like we didn’t all see what we actually saw.
Kamala Harris and 13 Biden campaign staffers even donated to a bail fund to free people who were arrested during the rioting in Minneapolis. She even encouraged other people to donate to it. And the Democrats at their national convention fully embraced BLM.
The results of the past year are stark.
Incredible stats, particularly in Portland pic.twitter.com/tX1ru4zx7k
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) June 28, 2021
That’s why the Biden team is running as fast as they can away from what they know is a very harmful issue, and trying to tag Republicans for a full-on Democrat-created problem.
But who is the WaPo’s Glenn Kessler gifting with four Pinocchios? He’s dinging Republican lawmakers Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Sen. Jim Banks (R- IN) for comments they made about Biden. Kessler says that Biden never said he wanted to defund the police and proposed funding in his budget for more police. Yes, Biden played both ends against the middle as he was running for election, not condemning folks like BLM while wanting to appear to be a moderate. But Biden also hired two “defund” Democrats for his DOJ, as the lawmakers pointed out. Kessler’s response to that? One of them said she would be supporting Biden’s policies. Sorry, seeing how radical his people have been, I don’t believe that. And what about the other one?
“This fact check needs a fact check,” Ruthless podcast co-host Michael Duncan reacted, refuting Kessler’s claim that “there is no evidence” that criminals released from the Minnesota Freedom Fund last year following the George Floyd riots “committed additional crimes after being released.”
“Biden nominated two prominent defund the police advocates to top jobs at the Justice Department. Vanita Gupta literally called for defunding the police in SWORN SENATE TESTIMONY. Giving this 4 Pinocchio’s to dismiss outright is nonsensical,” GOP strategist Matt Whitlock tweeted. “Also kind of amazing that they’ll fact-check a Cruz tweet on this but ignore the White House’s strategic decision to lie about Republicans and police funding.”
Indeed. Where is the fact check on the Biden team’s present flagrant lies about the Republicans? Kessler quibbles with the wording of blaming Biden personally, while missing the far greater picture of Biden lying about the Republicans and the Democrats being behind defunding. But hey, no bias here.
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