House Democrats appear to be making up more stuff about the Jan. 6 Capitol riot in what’s become a routine practice for their latest hoax.
Last week on the House floor, Maryland Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin read a text message sent to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows purportedly from a “House lawmaker” to overthrow President Joe Biden’s electoral college majority.
“HERE’s an AGGRESSIVE STRATEGY,” the text read. “Why can t [sic] the states of [Georgia] [North Carolina] [Pennsylvania] and other R controlled state houses declare this is BS (where conflicts and election not called that night) and just send their own electors to vote and have it go to the SCOTUS.”
Raskin later retracted his initial attribution to “House lawmaker,” with a spokesman for the congressman telling CNN it was a mistake. Anonymous sources told the network that it was, as CNN described it, an “inadvertent error.”
CNN reported that the text likely came from former Texas Republican Gov. Rick Perry, whose phone number allegedly matched the number provided by the Select Committee on Jan. 6. The Federalist has not been able to independently verify that the text came from the former governor and Trump’s energy secretary, a spokesman for whom did not respond to The Federalist’s inquiries.
Neither the offices for Raskin nor Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, who chairs the Select Committee, immediately responded to The Federalist’s request for comment.
The apparent fabrication comes on the heels of The Federalist reporting last week that California Rep. Adam Schiff was caught doctoring a text message to Meadows from Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan.
The text exchange, which Schiff said exposed “a lawmaker” pressing the vice president to unilaterally deny certification of the electoral college votes as unconstitutional, actually came from Washington attorney and former Department of Defense Inspector General Joseph Schmitz. It was merely forwarded by the Ohio congressman.
The message, which Schiff took out of context with added punctuation to make it appear complete and a cooked-up graphic to illustrate it, was part of a four-page document that outlined the legal reasons behind Vice President Mike Pence’s authority to object to electoral certification from a handful of states. The document was published publicly ahead of Jan. 6 on everylegalvote.com.
The Jan. 6 Committee later confirmed The Federalist’s reporting and admitted that the messages were manipulated.
Speaking in a prime-time performance on Dec. 13, Cheney went after Trump for waiting “187 minutes” to act on the riot “when action by our president was required, indeed essential, and compelled by his oath to our Constitution.” An actual examination of the day’s events, however, reveals no such delay. The outgoing president made an online statement calling for peace within 25 minutes of the first building break-in.