Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) perpetuated the falsehood that Donald Trump Jr. was “threatening” the family of the judge overseeing his father’s case in New York.
Ahead of former President Donald J. Trump’s arraignment on Tuesday, reports surfaced indicating that Loren Merchan, the daughter of Acting Justice for the Supreme Court in New York County Juan Merchan, is the president and partner of a digital agency that took the “Biden-Harris” campaign on as a client in 2020. Breitbart News highlighted that Loren Merchan’s archived LinkedIn page shows she also worked as the “Director of Digital Persuasion” for Harris’s 2020 campaign.
Trump Jr. shared the Breitbart News article, which bore a lead image of the father and daughter, to Twitter and Truth Social. Outrage ensued as the likes of Washington Post lead fact checker Glenn Kessler falsely claimed that Trump Jr. and Eric Trump posted “photos” of Loren Merchan rather than news articles and asserted it was “obviously intended to intimidate.”
Twitter CEO Elon Musk later suggested placing a label on accounts like those of Kessler, stating they are “frequently posting incorrect information,” as Breitbart News reported.
Ocasio-Cortez shared a similar sentiment to Kessler, using the false framing that Trump Jr. merely posted a picture rather than a news report.
“Let’s be very clear: intimidation and stochastic terror are the core tools of Trump and the fascist movements that support him,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote.
Though Joyce Alene, whose tweet Ocasio-Cortez referenced in her post, initially stated that Trump Jr. “posted a picture” of Loren Merchan, she noted the image was part of a Breitbart News article in a follow-up tweet. Ocasio-Cortez opted only to amplify the post that falsely stated Trump Jr. “posted a picture” of Merchan, even though Alene’s subsequent tweet was already published at the time.
Twitter users were quick to criticize the congresswoman. National Constitutional Law Union Executive Director Natalie Danielsihen highlighted Ocasio-Cortez’s comments “mocking Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh after protestors forced him to leave a Washington D.C. restaurant” following the court reversal of the Roe v. Wade decision that made abortion a matter for states to decide.
“Poor guy. He left before his soufflé because he decided half the country should risk death if they have an ectopic pregnancy within the wrong state lines. It’s all very unfair to him,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted at the time.
David Harsanyi, a senior editor for the Federalist, also fired back at Ocasio-Cortez. He tweeted a New York Post article highlighting her calls for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to resign, in part, over comments that his wife made.
“Is going after Ginni Thomas ‘stochastic terror?'” he wrote.
In response, the Republican Party of Forsyth County in North Carolina quipped, “No, what she’s trying to say, with words that she doesn’t know what they mean, is that she hopes the same standards are not applied to the Trump judge.”
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