By JOHN SOLOMON | JUST THE NEWS
The Donald Trump era has brought countless examples in which Democrats, bureaucrats, and the establishment news media wove a sensational tale that turned out to be false.
There’s the Russia collusion caper that wasn’t, the 51 security experts who wrongly claimed Hunter Biden’s laptop was misinformation, the Ukraine quid-pro-quo call that had neither a quid nor a quo, and the Moscow bounties on U.S. troops’ heads that never happened.
Now the Jan. 6 panel — led in part by the Russian collusion advocate Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif. — has been called on the carpet for falsely suggesting a GOP lawmaker ran a reconnaissance mission inside the Capitol for Jan. 6 protesters the day before the riot.
Ironically, the man who blew that whistle is the new Capitol Police Chief J. Thomas Manger, who got his job on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s watch but handed Republicans vindication on an allegation they long claimed was a smear.
Manger wrote in a letter Monday to Congress, which Just the News obtained, that an exhaustive review of security footage found no evidence that Republican Rep. Barry Loudermilk of Georgia did anything other than give constituents a tour of some congressional office buildings.
In fact, the chief said, the congressman didn’t even enter the U.S. Capitol with the group.
“There is no evidence that Representative Loudermilk entered the U.S. Capitol with this group on January 5, 2021,” Manger wrote in a letter to Rep. Rodney Davis, R-Ill., the ranking Republican on the House Administration Committee. “We train our officers on being alert for people conducting surveillance or reconnaissance, and we do not consider any of the activities we observed as suspicious.”
“All I can think of is this is a Soviet-style propaganda trial, like a show trial,” Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y., who spent time working in Communist Yugoslavia earlier in her career, told Just the News. “They put this tape together using propaganda, selected words and clauses cut and pasted to smear the people they want to smear and to get the outcome.”
“They put this tape together using propaganda, selected words and clauses cut and pasted to smear the people they want to smear and to get the outcome.”
– Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y.
Rep, Rodney Davis, the Illinois Republican who pressed Capitol Police to review the evidence and clear Loudermilk, said Democrats who besmirched his colleague’s name need to face accountability before the House Ethics Committee.
“The Democrats need to be ashamed of themselves,” Davis told the “Just the News, Not Noise” television show Monday night.
Former Georgia Rep. Doug Collins, who played a role unraveling the Russia collusion narrative, said Democrats have reached the political limits of the proverbial boy-cry-wolf tale, and it is time for their enablers in the mainstream media to push back. Some of the biggest names in media reported the Loudermilk allegations when they surfaced last month.
“I’m wondering how many of these political writers — The New York Times Washington Post, all these folks — are actually lining up to give the retractions,” Collins told Just the News. “…Let’s just be honest. They buy any narrative they can to impugn conservative congressmen, to malign Donald Trump, to make this event that they’re trying to pin basically on the conservative movement. And they’re willing to destroy lives, you know, really to do it without actually investigating, without reporting.”
The Loudermilk tale gives a case study on how an unsubstantiated claim spreads from one congressperson to the next, requiring weeks before officials knock it down with facts and evidence.
