Karine Jean-Pierre was tapped to succeed Jen Psaki as White House press secretary last week and will take over on May 14. Unfortunately she has trouble accepting legitimate election results.
Yet as the White House continues to use January 6 as fodder for its political base, and as networks like CNN and MSNBC continue to cover the riot as a top story, almost all of them have been silent on Jean-Pierre’s own dangerous history of election denialism.
In December 2016, Jean Pierre tweeted from her personal account, “Stolen emails, stolen drone, stolen election … welcome to the world of #unpresidented Trump.” In a 2018 tweet, she declared that Georgia Governor Brian Kemp had stolen the election from Democratic nominee Stacey Abrams. There’s not a lot of room to hedge both of those tweets. She even repeated the 2018 Georgia claim in March 2019, stating in a reply tweet that “yes – the race was stolen.”
Jean-Pierre appeared regularly at this time as a guest on CNN and MSNBC, and with some of their most well known hosts like Chuck Todd and Chris Cuomo. Those same networks have labeled the Capitol riots an insurrection and given the events of that day the moniker “big lie,” invoking Hitler. So why are these same news outlets now ignoring the incoming White House press secretary’s own history with insurrectionist talk? And how does Jean-Pierre plan to address January 6 from the podium?
As of now, Jean-Pierre has not gone on record to explain her tweets, correct them, or delete them (someone did access her old tweets and turned off replies). Instead there’s been a complete and total lack of curiosity from the corporate and network press about fraudulent election claims in the most powerful institution on earth.
One of these uninterested journalists is CNN host Jake Tapper, who has been one of the biggest propagators of “the big lie” vernacular. While appearing at a livestream event with Mother Jones editor Clara Jeffery in 2021, Tapper stated that “election lies are not a difference about tax policy. It’s not a disagreement about a social issue. The election lies are lies. It’s no less a lie than saying that the moon landing was faked or that the Holocaust didn’t happen or that Bush knew about 9/11 and let it happen. These are offensive ideas.”
Yet Jean-Pierre’s own words on stolen elections appear to be acceptable to Tapper, at least as of now. The question should be why the same rules do not apply to everyone and where all this will lead. The answer is nowhere good.
