By I & I Editorial Board, Issues & Insights | November 13, 2024
Until the Daily Wire uncovered concrete evidence that the Federal Emergency Management Administration was telling relief workers to avoid Trump-supporting homes, the press was happy to take FEMA’s word and debunk accusations of political favoritism.
Now that the FEMA employee at the center of the current scandal is saying that she’s a scapegoat and that the problem is far deeper and wider, will the mainstream press ignore this too?
In the wake of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, FEMA came under attack for its seemingly sluggish response to devastation in heavily Republican areas of the Southeast.
Poppycock, responded the press, regurgitating talking points from the agency.
But then the Daily Wire got hold of messages from a FEMA supervisor telling workers to “avoid homes advertising Trump” in Lake Placid, Florida, when going door to door to find those who qualified for financial aid. It also had screenshots of reports from workers saying they were “not able to access property,” with a note “Trump sign, no contact, per leadership.”
FEMA issued a response and fired the supervisor, saying her actions were in violation of the agency’s “core values and principles to help people regardless of their political affiliation.”
And that is where the mainstream press is happy to let the story rest.
But the FEMA supervisor, Marn’i Washington, isn’t going gently into that good night. She says she’s being made the scapegoat.
“FEMA’s very well aware of the incidents that take place, not just with my crew, but with all the crews in the states,” Washington said on a podcast. “This is not isolated. This is a colossal event of avoidance.”
She said the agency lied when it claimed she’d acted on her own, and that her supervisor approved the message.
And the New York Post reported yesterday that:
A former FEMA official backed up Washington’s claims, telling The Post that the practice of skipping Trump-supporting houses is an open secret at the agency that has been going on for years.
The rest of the mainstream press seems utterly uninterested in this new revelation. We couldn’t find a story in either the Washington Post or the New York Times about it in the past 24 hours.
If this all sounds familiar, it should.
Those who’ve been around a while will remember the IRS scandal during President Barack Obama’s tenure, when the IRS was caught red-handed targeting conservative groups in the run-up to the 2012 election by holding up their applications for non-profit status.
At first, the IRS claimed it was the work of two rogue agents in its Cincinnati office. That turned out to be a lie, as evidence started to emerge that the instructions were coming from officials in Washington, D.C., all the way up to the head of the IRS’s tax-exempt division, Lois Lerner.
As we wrote when we were running the editorial page of Investor’s Business Daily:
Lerner was caught red-handed targeting Tea Party and other conservative groups, wrote partisan emails to prove it, then engaged in a massive cover-up effort — with a suspiciously crashed server, an oddly missing BlackBerry and plenty of excuses.
All the while, the mainstream press spent more time trying to debunk this scandal, claiming that the IRS routinely denies applications for non-profit status, that there was no concrete evidence that conservative groups were singled out, etc.
And when it turned out there was a coordinated effort – one specifically designed to thwart conservative attempts to get out the vote in 2012 – the press buried it and moved on as quickly as possible.
As a result, the Justice Department let Lois Lerner skate – she retired on a full pension. The head of the IRS at the time, John Koskinen, who lied and stonewalled a congressional investigation, served out his term. Obama dismissed it as a “phony scandal.”
And in the end, nothing was done to root out the politicization of this agency. In fact, as soon as Democrats had a chance under President Joe Biden, they showered the IRS with an additional $80 billion to hire more enforcement agents.
We saw the same thing play out with the Russiagate scandal, where the public was repeatedly assured that the FBI had done everything by the book only to learn that there was a collaborative effort to use the law enforcement division to target President Donald Trump.
So, the idea that one FEMA employee was acting independently is almost certainly bogus.
Tom Bevan, co-founder of RealClearPolitics – which unlike other news outlets sent investigative reporters to the region to look into claims of political favoritism by FEMA – says that:
It seems unlikely that some random supervisor would just come up with this on their own and direct their people to do this, that it didn’t come from higher up.
Indeed it does. And like the IRS scandal under Obama, and the FBI scandals under Trump, the media will show zero interest in finding out just how high this weaponization of government goes or how many other agencies are infested with political vermin who are willing to use their powers to coddle liberals and attack conservatives.
Nope. Instead, they are writing stories about how terrified government staffers are at the prospect that Trump will finally carry out his plan to drain the swamp of political hacks masquerading as non-partisan government bureaucrats.
I&I Editorial Board - & Insights was founded by seasoned journalists of the IBD Editorials page. Our mission is to provide timely, fact-based reporting and deeply informed analysis on the news of the day – without fear or favor.
Original article link
