White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt pulled absolutely no punches when sounding off on a reporter’s characterization of what Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has done as “reckless”, a comment with which Leavitt took a great degree of issue and which she used to skewer the reporter as a left-wing hack.
For reference, the reporter involved was Niall Stanage, a White House columnist for The Hill. Stanage’s question was provoked by Trump Administration officials like Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem insisting that the immigration agencies have done “everything correctly”. Stanage tried to attack that characterization by pointing to the shooting of Renee Good, who died after being shot when allegedly trying to run over an ICE agent.
So, pointing to the shooting and a couple of incidents in which detainees have died in ICE custody, but primarily focusing on the shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Stanage asked Leavitt, “How does that equate to them doing everything correctly?”
Leavitt, responding with a question of her own, asked, “Why was Renee Good, unfortunately and tragically, killed?” Stanage, annoyed at being asked a question in reply, attacked ICE and insisted that the shooting could not be justified and was reckless. He snapped, “You’re asking me my opinion? Because an ICE agent acted recklessly and killed her unjustifiably.”
Leavitt immediately shot back by hammering Stanage for pushing leftist opinions under the guise of neutrality and facts, snapping that he is “biased” and “left wing”. She began by snapping, “Oh, okay. So you’re a biased reporter with a left-wing opinion.” Leavitt added, further twisting the knife, “You’re a left-wing hack.”
Then, commenting on how Stanage was pushing opinions under the guise of journalistic integrity rather than informing readers of the facts, the White House press secretary said, “You’re not a reporter; you’re posing in this room as a journalist…You’re a left-wing activist.”You should be reporting on the facts…”
Adding to that, she hammered Stanage for not seeming to care a bit about what happens to actual Americans in the context of illegal aliens, saying, “Do you have the numbers of how many American citizens were killed at the hands of illegal aliens who ICE is trying to remove from this country? I bet you don’t…”
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Emphasizing that yet further, Leavitt commented on a couple of young American girls who have been horribly killed by illegal aliens, something that leftist journalists don’t seem to care about, saying, “I bet you never even read about Laken Riley, or Jocelyn Nungaray, or all of the innocent Americans who were killed at the hands of illegal aliens in this country.”
Concluding, the press secretary went back to shaming the woke media for pushing a biased view that blames ICE agents for defending themselves while pretending that such a leftist outlook is honest journalism, saying, “Shame on people like you in the media who have a crooked view, and have a biased view, and pretend like you’re a real, honest journalist.”
Watch her here:
Featured image credit: Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons