FPI / December 4, 2020
Caught red handed. There's collusion afoot in the Biden universe. As Adam Schiff would say, what's the kompromat?
A photo has emerged showing Jen Psaki, an Obama administration official who would be press secretary in the event of a Joe Biden presidency, sporting a pink hammer & sickle hat while hanging out with Russian officials in Paris in 2014.
The photo from Jan. 13, 2014, which was recently re-posted to Twitter by Trump campaign spokesman Matt Wolking, shows Psaki with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, and then-Secretary of State John Kerry.
No one has alleged that the photo was altered or fraudulent.
There was nothing misleading about Wolking's tweet. It was not Photoshopped. No disinformation. It wasn't a right-wing conspiracy. Wolking merely described the photo.
But USA Today, which may be auditioning to displace the NY Times as a Biden administration's main propaganda outlet, actually took it upon itself to fact-check the Psaki photo. After a rigorous examination, USA Today's fact-checkers determined that the photo was "missing context."
Townhall.com writer Gabriella Hoffman tweeted: "Missing context?! Sorry, this IS inexcusable. Not to sound harsh here, but if you abhor Nazism and Nazi symbols, you ought to equally abhor the communist hammer & sickle. Pleading ignorance here is unacceptable. But I'm just a kid of immigrants who fled the USSR...What do I know."
Donald Trump Jr. tweeted: "Why are you fat checking this? No one’s making a claim just showing her wearing a commie hat… THATS A FACT!!! If the media stopped running cover for Democrats as their primary mission maybe they have some credibility left."
USA Today should have done a fact-check on its fact-checkers. The article cited an anonymous source as saying that Psaki didn't keep the hat.
Psaki is on the record as telling reporters she kept the commie hat and took it to the White House when she became communications director for President Barack Obama in March 2015.
In a tweet sent out Tuesday evening, Psaki suggested that the fact the photo has resurfaced is "Russian propaganda."
"For anyone who hasn't been the target of Russian propaganda (cc: @MCFaul @HillaryClinton) the purpose is to discredit powerful messengers and to spread misinformation to confuse the public. Anyone who repeats it is (unwitting or not) simply a puppet of the propaganda machine," Psaki wrote.
The Right Scoop noted: "Yes, it’s ironically humorous to observe how this would be viewed were it a Trump official, given the wild and reckless allegations over the last few years. But considering she worked for a socialist and might be about to work for another, it’s actually not all THAT funny that she’s grinning while sporting the emblem of the great and evil empire the United States spent almost a half century fighting and defeating, an oppressive and aggressive power marked by brutality and a death toll that rivaled and in some ways exceeded the Nazis themselves."
Free Press International
