As I wrote a few days ago, Rep. Craig escaped an attacker who punched her and grabbed her by the neck in the elevator of her D.C. apartment building by throwing hot coffee in her assailant’s face. Craig has expressly disavowed defunding the police, but the NRCC, chaired by Craig’s colleague Rep. Richard Hudson, is falsely accusing her of “backtracking” and hypocrisy for saying, “We have to get these repeat offenders off the streets.”
In an interview with Craig, CNN’s Jake Tapper read part of the NRCC smear: “Violent crime is running rampant while hypocrites like Angie Craig are backtracking on their previous support for defunding the police. In recent years Craig received donations from organizations that support defunding the police – even hiring defund the police advocates and siding with Ilhan Omar 93% of the time.” (The NRCC statement also misspelled Omar’s first name.)
Unlike the NRCC and Fox News, who targeted Craig with the same smear, Tapper checked the facts and called out the lies. “It’s really spurious stuff,” he said. “I’ve never found any evidence that you ever called for defunding the police.”
Tapper also highlighted that the chair of the NRCC is a colleague. “Did they really put that statement out after you were physically attacked?” he asked, incredulous.
Yes, they did. Craig told Tapper that the NRCC put out the statement five days after her assault, when she still had a bruise and a cut on her face. She said the lie is “so egregious” that the head of the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association, the rank and file members of law enforcement, put out a press release “saying just how ridiculous these accusations have been because I’ve done nothing but help law enforcement.”
The false accusations are bad enough but afterward, Craig received threatening phone calls that echoed the right-wing lies.
Craig called the episode “an illustration of how gutter politics and outright lies and absurdities have infiltrated our politics and frankly, Fox News and many of the commentators who worked there.” She added that it’s not just dangerous to elected officials but “dangerous to our democracy when you can't tell the truth to your viewers.”
“To be clear, even if you had called for defunding the police, that doesn't mean that anybody should be making light of you being punched in the face,” Tapper said. But on top of that, “they’re also just lying. It’s also a blatant lie.”
Yep. But that’s the MAGA GOP and Fox News: looking for any excuse to smear and demonize a Democrat and the heck with the truth.
