Media Research Center researcher Brad Wilmouth has turned into quite the Donald Trump toady. We just caught him through the conservative Cato Institute under the bus to protect Trump.
In a Sept. 21 post, Wilmouth is offended that CNN guest and college professor Jason Johnson asserted that Trump “continually associates himself with terrorist organizations like the Klan,” complaining that “Johnson has a history of making incendiary accusations of racism.” Johnson’s claim about a Trump-KKK link was overstated but not without basis, so Wilmouth has something of a point.
But Wilmouth tried to go further, asserting that in a TV appearance earlier in the hear, Johnson “repeated a discredited claim that Louisiana Republican Rep. Steve Scalise spoke to a white supremacist group in Louisiana in 2002.” Wilmouth links to one of his own posts on the subject from February that offers this defense for Scalise:
The story about Rep. Scalise speaking to a racist group originated in December 2014 with a liberal blogger who claimed that the Louisiana Republican spoke at a convention for the European-American Unity and Rights Organization — founded by white supremacist and former KKK leader David Duke — in the congressman’s home state in 2002.
Even though the man who booked hotel space for the convention, Kenny Knight, has claimed the event Rep. Scalise spoke to was a separate event for his local community group which he held in the same hotel to take advantage of the available space, while a flyer for the convention shows no sign that Scalise was one of the scheduled speakers, the CNN guest still tried to use the story to connect Republicans to the KKK.
Wilmouth seems to have missed the fact that more than a year earlier, Scalise issued an apology for speaking to Duke’s organization.
So Johnson’s claim is not “discredited,” and Wilmouth’s defense of Scalise is dishonest and ignores the relevant fact that Scalise apologized for it, and he repeats his false defense in order to dishonestly bash a Trump critic.
That’s “media research” these days at the MRC.