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Washington Post Ripped For Making Up Trump Quotes On Report About Call With GA Investigator

By • March 16, 2021 2:33 pm

The Washington Post is getting backlash after it issued a correction to a previous report it published related to the supposed content of the call between then President Donald Trump with Frances Watson, the chief investigator of the Georgia Secretary of State’s office at the height of the election fraud issue in December.

The left-leaning publication said it “misquoted” the former Republican President in the highly-sensitive report — which hit national headlines for several weeks that time and even fueled impeachment calls against Trump.

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“The Post attributed fraudulent quotes to Trump based on a single anonymous source familiar with the December 23 phone call. The newspaper published the fake quotes in a January article playing up the president’s alleged efforts to interfere in Georgia’s presidential election,” The Dailywire wrote.

The publication said it “misattributed” quotes of the former president “ordering” the Georgia investigator to “find the fraud” — and saying that Trump said the investigator would be a “national hero.”

The correction came after The Wall Street Journal published the audio of the phone call last week, which debunked multiple news reports that attributed fake quotes to Trump — and catching WaPo red handed for its mistake as well. 

Backlash for ‘damaging’ false report

Senior Writer at RealClearInvestigations, Mark Hemingway, said the revelation goes to prove how the mainstream media now lacks credibility.

“This kind of mistake is beyond serious. There’s zero accountability in major corporate media anymore, yet they continually insist they’re the ones holding the line on the truth. And always remember what should scare you about the media is what *doesn’t get exposed,” Hemingway wrote on Twitter. 

“Also note headline on the Post’s follow-up story is a sort of maliciously anodyne ‘Recording reveals details of Trump call to Georgia’s chief elections investigator.’ It’s not ‘Trump’s Remarks Grossly Misrepresented Across Media, Because We Credulously Fall For Political Ops,” he added.

CNN conservative commentator Mary Katherine Ham, also lambasted whoever wrote the report and suggested that the publication’s mistake “should cost someone his job.”

“So, they made up quotes. What in the actual F,” Ham commented on the correction.

“The header for this story could be a little clearer, like ‘Our Bad, We Made Fake News That Led the National News For Weeks And This Audio Proves It,’” she added with a link to the WaPo’s story.

“For those in my timeline asking me if it really matters bc Trump [is] bad anyway, Yes it really matters! Quotes being correct matters a lot. Don’t you see that’s the issue? If a reporter is so dead sure that ‘Trump is bad anyway,’ he is less inclined to question or vet his own stories.” Ham continued. 

“And don’t give me the ‘corrections are an example of the system working’ stuff. Sometimes they are! Here, they’re coming in 3 mos later when they were outed by a recording & the correction & new story are designed to downplay as much as possible, not blare as loudly as [the] original.”

Cover-up with the GA Secretary of State?

Amid the criticisms of The Washington Post, others also noted how there’s seemed to have been a cover-up of the story in the first place after “the Georgia Secretary of State deleted the full audio of the call … only later found in a trash folder on a state computer.”

“The Washington Post made sure not to issue their correction until well after the Senate changed hands thanks to Georgia,” one user wrote.

The Trump-Watson conversation revealed

During the six-minute call between the former president and the GA chief investigator, The Wall Street Journal, noted that Trump repeatedly said that he won Georgia and that “something bad happened.” 

Earlier reports done by mostly  left-leaning mainstream publications like CNN and The Washington Post, however, said that Trump urged Watson to “find the fraud” in the election, and allegedly told her she would be a “national hero.”

The audio recording of the conversation, however, found that the president said neither line.

Here’s the full transcript of the call: “I won everything but Georgia, and I won Georgia, I know that, by a lot, and the people know it, and something happened there, something bad happened,” Trump said on the call. 

“I hope you go back two years as opposed to just checking one against the other because that would just be sort of a signature check that doesn’t mean anything. But if you go back two years, and if you can get to [Fulton County], you are going to find things that are unbelievable. The dishonesty.”

To which, Watson answered: “I can assure you that our team and the [Georgia Bureau of Investigation], that we are only interested in the truth and finding the information that is based on the facts. We’ve been working 12-16 hour days and, you know, we’re working through it. So I can assure you that.”

Towards the end of the phone call, Trump told the investigator said: “When the right answer comes out, you’ll be praised.”

The Washington Post correction

Meanwhile, in its lengthy correction, The Washington Post wrote: “Two months after publication of this story, the Georgia secretary of state released an audio recording of President Donald Trump’s December phone call with the state’s top elections investigator.”

“The recording revealed that The Post misquoted Trump’s comments on the call, based on information provided by a source.”

“Trump did not tell the investigator to “find the fraud” or say she would be “a national hero” if she did so. Instead, Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize ballots in Fulton County, Ga., asserting she would find ‘dishonesty’ there. He also told her that she had “the most important job in the country right now.” 

Reacting on the retraction, former president Trump’s eldest son said the false quotes were made “to fit their narrative.”

“Shocked to hear that the media would blindly run with something that fit their desired narrative driving a weeks long outrage cycle without real info,” Donald Trump Jr. said.

“Find The Fraud, You’ll Be A Hero’ Was A Lie: WaPo Issues Major Retraction After Audio Vindicates Trump,” he added, as a suggested head to the story.

Former President Trump also responded to The Washington Post and said that “while [he] appreciates the correction,” the “original story was a hoax” to begin with.

Steeve Strange

Steeve is the CEO & Co-Founder of The Scoop.
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