The Atlantic published a report Thursday evening accusing President Trump of disparaging service members who fought and died during World War I during a trip to France. The story has multiple sources – all of them anonymous.
Since the story broke, six former White House officials – who were with the president at the time of the alleged incident – have gone on the record to categorically deny the account ever took place. John Bolton, hardly a fan of the President, detailed the trip to France in his book, and wrote the President’s decision not to visit a French cemetery outside of Paris in 2018 was because of travel complications due to inclement weather – not because the President was nervous the rain would mess up his hair, as the Atlantic reports.
It’s shoddy, crap journalism and a complete joke. Yet another anonymous smear job against the President Trump weeks before the election.
This is not the first time The Atlantic has published fake news. Just weeks ago, it fabricated a story about a cop shooting a black child and getting away with it. The writer claimed to be an eye-witness. The Federalist originally called into question the original reporting – where they couldn’t find proof that much of the author’s story ever happened.
According to The Federalist:
“We called 911 for almost everything except snitching” reads the first line of an Atlantic article, “How I Became a Police Abolitionist,” by social justice activist and lawyer Derecka Purnell. Her deeply personal essay, first published July 6 in the Ideas section, tells of her childhood in a polluted neighborhood surrounded by violence and beset by fear, using one particularly disturbing memory of a police officer shooting their cousin, just a “boy,” in the arm for skipping the basketball sign-in sheet in front of Purnell and her sister, who had been playing basketball but were forced to hide “in the locker room for hours afterward.”
“When people dismiss abolitionists for not caring about victims or safety,” she writes, “they tend to forget that we are those victims, those survivors of violence.”
“This story means everything to me,” Purnell wrote on Facebook later that day. “I cried a lot while writing it.”
An investigation by The Federalist encompassing newspaper archives, police department records, questions to The Atlantic, the police union, and the office of the mayor, however, called the story — including facts about the neighborhood, the timeline of the incident, and if the incident described even happened at all — into question.
Four days, six comment requests, and one follow-up story later, The Atlantic issued a series of major corrections that confirmed The Federalist’s investigation — and gutted the Purnell’s story of the police violence that made her “a police abolitionist,” rendering it a story about a private security guard shooting his adult cousin. Although the updated story no longer involves personally motivated and barely punished police violence against children, it now includes mention of a police investigation. Additionally, a contemporary news article uncovered by The Federalist using the updated timeline details pending police charges against the shooter.
Someone in the neighborhood, it appears, called 911.
The Atlantic also pushed the debunked Russia collusion hoax throughout 2016 and the years after.
Be forewarned, prescheduled “scandals” pushed by the mainstream media will be published regularly between now and Election Day. Pundits, politicos and propagandists will all pretend these “bombshells” are organic, based on through reporting, and all clutch their pearls when the stories hit. Most of American, however, knows and understands what’s going on. We’ve seen it before – in 2016.