On Sunday, Mollie Hemingway appeared on Fox News to defend embattled EPA head Scott Pruitt's "need" for Secret Service Agents to walk him from his bed to his bathroom when he gets up to pee in the middle of the night. KIDDING! Sort of.
She claimed the "Boot Pruitt" movement was started by radical leftist environmentalists, and is now a cause the media has adopted. Oh, that lazy, dishonest media. SAD! Only reporting about Pruitt's "high" security costs without reporting how many death threats he has gotten! What's that? FOUR TIMES the number of death threats as other EPA heads, you say, Mollie?
Well, that's terrible, if true, and we need to save him from the "Leftist Activists [who] truly try to kill Republican Leaders!" But is it true? Even people at Fox News are beginning to have their suspicions. Joseph Weber wrote,
A nationwide search of state and federal court records by the Associated Press found no case in which anyone was arrested or charged with threatening Pruitt, the wire service said Friday.
Jason Leopold, from Buzzfeed, filed a Freedom of Information Act request to find out about these threats...and came up with...nothing. There are no records at the EPA of ANY death threats against Pruitt.
Isn't it then more fair to say Pruitt received four times the death threats the FOI request produced? Using that logic, one could say he has received 683 times the death threats the FOI request produced...since any number multiplied by zero is still zero, if my rudimentary math skills still hold up. Maybe that is what Hemingway meant.
So. Where are all these dangerous, angry, threatening, leftist extremists? You're more likely to find them at a March for Our Lives rally. They're the liberals who are truly making Republican leaders quake in their boots.
Transcript below:
HEMINGWAY: Technically, it was a group of environmental... that started the campaign last week called boot Pruitt, but there's something kind of unseemly about this media reaction. They seem to be taking this campaign and running with it, just carrying that water.
KURTZ: Do you think it's because of Pruitt's record of scaling back on environmental regulation?
HEMINGWAY: Well, I think it's very true that people don't like Pruitt because he's very effective at his job, but just from the media angle, I'm saying it's okay for radical environment groups to run this campaign. There doesn't seem to be any daylight between those groups and the media themselves, and they're not reporting a lot of the story.
For instance, they're saying he has high security costs, without reporting that he's had four times the number of death threats, and this is in an administration that's actually had leftist activists truly try to kill Republican leaders.
