Jake Tapper Claims He “Misspoke” As CNN Spreads Michigan Attorney General’s Bald-Faced Lie about Rashida Tlaib
Photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images for The Atlantic
Michigan Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel recently told a lie about a publicly available quote from Rep. Rashida Tlaib who was criticizing her for charging pro-Palestinian protesters with crimes. Nessel said that “Rashida should not use my religion to imply I cannot perform my job fairly as Attorney General. It’s anti-Semitic and wrong.”
Here is the quote from Rashida Tlaib that Nessel is seemingly referencing, from a Detroit Metro Times interview:
“We’ve had the right to dissent, the right to protest. We’ve done it for climate, the immigrant rights movement, for Black lives and even around issues of injustice among water shutoffs. But it seems that the attorney general decided if the issue was Palestine, she was going to treat it differently, and that alone speaks volumes about possible biases within the agency she runs…I think people at the University of Michigan put pressure on her to do this, and she fell for it.”
There is no mystery as to what allegations Rashida Tlaib was making in this quote. It’s crystal clear that she looks to the University of Michigan as the undue influence here. To charge her with a personal antisemitic attack over pointing out inconsistencies in the Michigan Attorney General’s office’s charges is just wrong, and personally as a Jew it dismays me to see our religion be weaponized like this over and over again in bad faith attacks. These kinds of lies make actual antisemitism much harder to call out in the future.
CNN’s Jake Tapper, someone who is no stranger to misconstruing allegations from powerful biased actors as fact, asked Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer about the AG’s charges of people at “anti-Israel protests,” as he chose to characterize them.
He cited a lie, a quote Tlaib never said as the Detroit Metro Times highlighted in their fact check, throwing it at the Michigan governor, falsely asserting that “Congresswoman Tlaib is suggesting that [Nessel] shouldn’t be prosecuting these individuals that Nessel says broke the law, and that she’s only doing it because she’s Jewish.”
Steve Neavling, the Detroit Metro Times reporter who published the quote from Rep. Tlaib, flat-out called Jake Tapper and CNN a bunch of liars for this complete and utter abdication of basic journalistic principles while elevating a smear against Congress’s only Palestinian American.
Now Dana Bash from CNN is lying about what happened. U.S. Rep. @RashidaTlaib did not say Nessel filed the charges because she’s Jewish. She said there is an anti-Palestinian attitude among many institutions, and most of them are not run by Jewish people. https://t.co/SiHqDyF3sw