Media Mostly Silent After Biden’s Rapid Response Director Calls Reporter Catherine Herridge a ‘Rightwing Hack’

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Legal Insurrection

On Wednesday, CBS News senior investigative correspondent Catherine Herridge shared the bombshell news about DNI acting director Richard Grenell’s notification to Congress of the declassified “unmasking list.” The list proved that some very high-level Obama administration officials, including then-Vice President Joe Biden and President Obama’s Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, “submitted requests to the National Security Agency at any point between 8 November 2016 and 31 January 2017, to unmask the identity of former National Security Advisor” Michael Flynn.

Predictably, Biden campaign surrogates and staffers went into attack mode – not just against President Trump and Grenell, but Herridge, too.

 

Biden senior campaign advisor Symone Sanders latched on to a tweet from panicked former Obama administration official Tommy Vietor. She agreed that the real issue here was that reporters like Herridge “fall for” alleged “revenge” tactics like these from the Trump administration, which Sanders believes distracts the liberal media from focusing on bashing Trump’s handling of the Wuhan Coronavirus outbreak:

Symone D. Sanders

 

✔@SymoneDSanders

 

 

Reporters that fall for this have learned absolutely nothing.

We have a pandemic on our hands & Trump’s failure to respond to it quickly has put us in a dire public health & economic crisis. We know it & apparently he knows it too hence this latest attempt at a distraction. https://twitter.com/tvietor08/status/1260652077161656322 …

Tommy Vietor

 

✔@TVietor08

Replying to @TVietor08

The scandal here is making an unqualified Twitter troll like Ric Grenell the acting Director of National Intelligence. He walks into the building without going through confirmation, immediately pushes out career professionals, and now is using the IC to enact revenge for Trump.

 

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Joe Biden’s director of rapid response, Andrew Bates, went much, much further, claiming Herridge was a “partisan, rightwing hack” and a “regular conduit for conservative media manipulation ploys.”

Bates deleted the tweet, but the Internet is forever:

Sister Toldjah @sistertoldjah

 

 

Here's Biden's director of rapid response attacking a respected member of the MSM because she reports facts inconvenient to Biden's campaign narratives. I eagerly await @brianstelter's and @oliverdarcy's swift condemnations of this attack on democracy and the free press. #ncpol

 

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Though Bates did delete the tweet, he did not apologize for it. He also left up a retweet of a comment a Democratic strategist made agreeing with his attack on Herridge:

Sister Toldjah @sistertoldjah

 

 

Shhh. Don't tell Biden's rapid response director Andrew Bates that he left up a retweet of a Democratic strategist who agreed with Bates's now-deleted tweet in which he viciously attacked CBS News reporter Catherine Herridge. #ncpol

 

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Bates’s attempt at intimidating and bullying a respected journalist came about a week and a half after Biden himself posted a short Twitter thread defending the freedom of the press, and talking about how bullying and intimidating the media was a sign of authoritarian tendencies:

Joe Biden

 

✔@JoeBiden

 · May 3, 2020

 

A free press is essential to a free society. That's why attacking the press and attempting to intimidate independent media is a standard part of the authoritarian playbook around the world. And it’s why Donald Trump’s efforts to demonize the media put us on such a dangerous path.

Joe Biden

 

✔@JoeBiden

 

Trump deflects legitimate questions with attacks. He bullies members of the press, instead of taking responsibility for his failures. His efforts to undermine public confidence in the integrity of reporting violate our core values and threaten our very system of government.

 

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CNN media correspondents Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy were nowhere in the immediate aftermath of the attack. This was odd. After all, both rushed to defend CBS News reporter Weijia Jiang and accuse Trump of racism and sexism after Jiang insinuated Tuesday during a press briefing that he told her to “ask China” in response to a question because she’s an Asian-American journalist.

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Some reporters are more equal than others...