Sens. Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren lied last weekend when they claimed Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri, had been “murdered” in 2014 by police officer Darren Wilson.
An independent Justice Department investigation found that there was no credible evidence to support the claim that the white officer “murdered” the 18-year-old black man. Instead, the report found Wilson had acted in self-defense. Brown was killed in the violent act of assaulting a police officer.
But try telling that to PolitiFact, which published an absurd, laugh-out-loud defense of the 2020 Democratic primary candidates Wednesday. Having split so many hairs in order to impugn Republicans, the fact-checker now believes that it is just too difficult to know what a person really means when they use the word “murder.”
“There is no question that Wilson killed Brown, and there’s strong evidence that it was not accidental,” the fact-checker explains in an article titled, “The death of Michael Brown, legal facts and Democratic messaging.”
It adds, “In discussing the case with legal experts, however, we found broad consensus that ‘murder’ was the wrong word to use — a legal point likely familiar to Harris, a longtime prosecutor, and Warren, a law professor.”
Harris said this weekend on social media, “Michael Brown’s murder forever changed Ferguson and America. His tragic death sparked a desperately needed conversation and a nationwide movement. We must fight for stronger accountability and racial equity in our justice system.”
Warren tweeted 35 minutes later, “5 years ago Michael Brown was murdered by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Michael was unarmed yet he was shot 6 times. I stand with activists and organizers who continue the fight for justice for Michael. We must confront systemic racism and police violence head on.”
Both senators’ professional backgrounds are law. Both know exactly what they said. Laughably, PolitiFact believes it is just too difficult to say.
“[E]xperts who have studied police-related deaths and race relations said that focusing too much on the linguistics in controversial cases comes with its own set of problems,” the organization claims in its investigation of their remarks.
This is a joke, right? No, it is not.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checker concludes its review of Warren’s and Harris’ lie with this ludicrous ruling: “Because the significance of Harris’ and Warrens’ use of the word is open to some dispute, we won’t be rating their tweets on the Truth-O-Meter.”
This nonruling is especially rich considering PolitiFact has had no difficulty whatsoever flunking Republicans and Republican-adjacent individuals for making similarly false statements. When President Trump’s idiot former lawyer Michael Cohen claimed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “murdered” Ambassador Christopher Stevens, PolitiFact quite easily awarded him a “pants on fire” rating. There was no great wrestling with the meaning of words then; there was no existential inquiry about the nature of truth.
It is simply amazing how facts and the importance of accuracy are suddenly up for debate when the story involves a Democrat.
Even worse, PolitiFact is the same outfit that has handed out “mostly false” awards to conservatives and Republicans for saying things PolitiFact itself concedes are factually accurate. Even when the right is correct, it is still wrong, according to the highly cited fact-checker.
The most ridiculous thing about all of this is that at the core of the PolitiFact article on Warren, Harris, and Brown is the question: How much should accuracy matter?
Delete your website, fact-checker.
