How far Bob Unruh has fallen. He was once an actual journalist for the Associated Press, which he threw away in 2006 to churn out highly biased political attacks at WorldNetDaily. Nearly 20 years later, Unruh is still at WND — well, technically, the WND News Center, the nonprofit organization WND offloaded its reporting to in a desperate cost-saving move; given that, it’s unlikely he’s making the same money he did a decade ago, which makes it more of a mystery why he stays. And as WND has descended even further into being nothing more than a pro-Trump propaganda rag, Unruh seems happy to churn out the propaganda — or perhaps he has just given up, knowing that he has so debased his skills that he’s unemployable at any real media outlet.
An example of this is an Oct. 2 article in which Unruh is content simply to parrot the propaganda of others:
A federal judge in Washington, who has established her own bias by repeatedly and publicly criticizing and condemning President Donald Trump, now has taken Jack Smith’s edited claims against Trump regarding the 2020 election and shoved them at voters just in time for Democrats to use them in their campaign against him.
The Gateway Pundit explained that Tanya Chutkan, who is hearing Smith’s claims that it was criminal for Trump to disbelieve and challenge the 2020 count, unsealed Smith’s 165-page “immunity motion” “to do the maximum damage to Trump before the election.”
Department of Justice standards previously have been that no such case, no such motion should be made public in the immediate runup to an election, when that case could affect the election.
The players here, Chutkan and Smith, apparently have abandoned that level of nonpartisanship.
Of course, Unruh abandoned any level of partisanship years ago because being a right-wing shill was apparently more lucrative than being an actual journalist. He went on to make even more claims he doesn’t back up with evidence:
The motion came about because Chutkan, in a hurry to try make the most of the attack on Trump, ruled earlier that Trump had no immunity for his actions as president. But she didn’t establish any sort of evidence on the dispute. The Supreme Court pointed that out when it confirmed Trump does have various levels of immunity at different times, and it sent the case back to Chutkan.
Smith, appointed by Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice to carry out this arm of the lawfare that has been assembled against Trump, submitted his claims now that Trump was a “private” individual for all regards concerning his re-election.
Smith’s claims include, “The defendant asserts that he is immune from prosecution for his criminal scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential election because, he claims, it entailed official conduct. Not so. Although the defendant was the incumbent President during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was fundamentally a private one. Working with a team of private co-conspirators, the defendant acted as a candidate when he pursued multiple criminal means to disrupt, through fraud and deceit, the government function by which votes are collected and counted—a function in which the defendant, as President, had no official role,” the Gateway Pundit quoted.
In fact, many of Trump’s actions and comments were, in fact, as president, not a private individual.
The only sources Unruh used in his article are Gateway Pundit, far-right “researcher” Julie Kelly — who Unruh makes a point of noting is a “self-described ‘insurrection denier'” — and Mike Davis of the right-wing Article III Project. Journalistic balance has become a foreign concept to him, as he refused to seek out any information that might contradict the propaganda he’s being paid to write about.
Unurh also repeated one of his favorite lies: “Mark Zuckerberg handed out some $400 million to local elections officials to help with deal with election requirements, and those officials often used the flood of cash to recruit Democrat [sic] voters, a campaign financing scandal that now is illegal in some states.” Yet Unruh has never offered any proof that any of the Zuckerberg money, let alone most of it, was used specifically to “recruit Democrat voters.”
The fact that Unruh continues to tell this lie seems to prove that WND is paying him to lie — something no self-respecting journalist would willingly do. Unruh has more than demonstrated he lacks that kind of self-respect.