Mainstream media reporters circulated the news Tuesday that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had “joined” a chant of “lock her up” by conservative high school students attending the Turning Point USA summit in Washington, D.C.
Some left-wing pundits even claimed that Sessions had “led” the chant. Politico, in the same vein, reported — as news — that the incident was “the latest example of President Donald Trump and his aides making aggressive gestures toward their political rivals” and that it “follows other moves by Trump and his aides that have alarmed not only Trump critics but other fellow Republicans.”
In fact, all Sessions did was laugh — once he recognized the chant — and comment that it had been heard on the campaign trail. As Breitbart News reported, and as video confirms: “Sessions laughed as the chants grew louder and replied, “‘Lock her up,’ I heard that a long time over the last campaign.”
That did not stop the media from pretending that Sessions’s response was somehow significant — and marked a further sign of descent into authoritarian rule:
At least one journalist, Julie Hirschfeld Davis of the New York Times, observed that all Sessions had done was try to “laugh it off.”
Sessions had testified during his confirmation hearings last year that he never joined the “lock her up” chants during the campaign.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
Photo: file
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