On Tuesday, Donald Trump lied in a fundraising email when he accused President Joe Biden of being “locked & loaded ready to take me out” during the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago that took place on Aug. 8, 2022, when Trump was working in New York.
He repeated the lie on “Truth Social”:
FOX News immediately amplified the lie:
From The Washington Post:
A former president falsely accusing his successor and rival of posing a threat to his life is without precedent in modern U.S. history. The comments marked a sharp escalation of Trump’s baseless attacks on Biden, as the former president faces 88 criminal charges across four indictments in federal and state courts. Trump has frequently accused Biden of weaponizing the legal system against him in coordination with the Justice Department and local prosecutors. There is no evidence of such coordination.
A Tuesday evening fundraising email from the Trump campaign that was signed in the candidate’s name arrived with the subject line, “They were authorized to shoot me!” and said of the Biden administration, “You know they’re just itching to do the unthinkable … Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger.”
NOTE: The FBI has a stock statement that deadly force is only permissible under a narrow set of circumstances, none of which was applicable to Trump by design because the Justice Department planned recovery when Trump was not there. Trump was in NYC at the time of document recovery.
Some news organizations framed the lie in the headline, like The Guardian:
Trump falsely claims US justice department was ready to kill him
Many parroted the lie, which cements it. Repetition = belief.
Of course, that is not the only lie in the email. Neither President Biden personally nor the Biden Administration has colluded with the New York legal system in his “cooks the books” actions that disguised “hush money” in a move to pervert a national election.
This is a developing story.
ADDED at 6:45 pm Pacific
This should be a developing story. Instead, it has already fallen off Memeorandum.
Known for gnawing at complex questions like a terrier with a bone. Digital evangelist, writer, teacher. Transplanted Southerner; teach newbies to ride motorcycles. @kegill (Twitter and Mastodon.social); wiredpen.com