Defending President Donald Trump to a blatantly biased press corps is a hardball game.
And White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt proved she knows how to play it during a news briefing Wednesday while fielding questions about Trump’s current battles with a U.S. District Court judge who seems to think he runs American foreign policy.
And Leavitt didn’t hold back.
Garrett Haake of NBC News (a network that’s a member in good standing of the biased liberal media) asked Leavitt if the administration planned to continue deportation flights of gang members to El Salvador while a case challenging their legality is before District Judge James Boasberg.
Leavitt responded that while there are no plans for the flights that are at the heart of that case, the administration plans to continue its deportation efforts.
Then she went off on not only the judge, but his wife, whom Leavitt described as a heavy Democratic supporter.
“I would just like to point out that the judge in this case is essentially trying say that the president doesn’t have the executive authority to deport foreign terrorists from our American soil,” she said.
“That is an egregious abuse of the bench. This judge does not have that authority, it is the opinion of this White House and of this administration — that’s why we’re fighting this in court.
Is it fair to criticize the spouses of D.C. elites when they can bias their mates’ decision-making?
“And it’s very, very clear that this is an activist judge who is trying to usurp the president’s authority …
“This judge, Judge Boasberg, is a Democrat activist. He was appointed by Barack Obama. His wife has donated more than $10,000 to Democrats, and he has consistently shown his disdain for this president and his policies, and it’s unacceptable.”
At that point, Haake snidely pointed out that Boasberg was actually appointed a judge by President George W. Bush, not Obama. That delighted lefties, like the libs at Raw Story, but it missed the point completely. It’s also misleading.
Boasberg, according to his federal court biography, was appointed by Bush to the District of Columbia Superior Court in 2002.
It was, in fact, then-President Barack Obama who put Boasberg on the federal bench in 2011. Suffice it to say, if Boasberg were still hearing domestic violence cases in D.C., Americans outside the Beltway wouldn’t know or care.
In short, he’s an Obama federal judge. The fact that liberals feel the need to obfuscate on that pretty much makes the truth plain.
The rest of Leavitt’s line of attack was even more on point.
Going after the spouse of a federal judge is almost always a tactic of the political left — just look at how the wives of Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have been treated.
But Leavitt went there — and could have gone a good deal further.
Boasberg’s wife, Liddy Manson, is not only a Democratic donor, as Federal Election Commission records confirm, she’s a woman so committed to the Democratic Holy Grail of abortion that she founded an abortion clinic — the Meadow Reproductive Health and Wellness in Tysons Corner, Virginia, after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. (Her LinkedIn page describes her as the clinic’s “founder and board chair.”)
And as Breitbart reported Tuesday, she has a history of specifically anti-Trump social media activity.
All of that is a far cry from even Ginny Thomas’ decades of activism in conservative causes (including the still-controversial 2020 election).
And it makes Martha-Ann Alito’s penchant for flying symbolic flags seem downright quaint.
Leavitt is almost certain to draw fire for bringing Manson into the story, but there’s a difference between pointing out the potential influences on a judge who’s issuing unprecedented rulings against the administration on his own authority and blindly attacking Supreme Court justices on any front that seems convenient.
There’s also a difference between criticizing the spouse of a judge in a White House news briefing and encouraging screaming street demonstrations outside the justices’ private homes, as Biden press secretary Jen Psaki did in May 2022. (A nearly successful assassination attempt on Justice Brett Kavanaugh followed less than a month later.)
But conservatives never get the pass that liberals do in the establishment media, just like Republican presidents don’t get the fawning White House press corps coverage that Democrats enjoy.
Joe Biden spent four years in the White House as a doddering old man, the corrupt commodity of an international influence-peddling scheme and the mainstream media found no reason to let the American public know about it.
Donald Trump just marked the second month since his return to the White House and the sharpshooters of the establishment media have him firmly in their sights.
Fortunately, he’s got staffers like Leavitt around him who are willing to take the fight right back — wherever it needs to go.
And playing hardball when they have to.
Advertise with The Western Journal and reach millions of highly engaged readers, while supporting our work. Advertise Today.
