WashPost Writers Eat Crow for Snubbing GOP Concerns of Boston Bomber Getting Biden Stimulus

The Washington Post will have to deal with.

Its dismissal of Sen. Tom Cotton’s (R-AR) warnings about the Boston Bomber getting paid under President Joe Biden’s gargantuan stimulus bill has resurfaced to haunt the rag.

Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler and opinion columnist Paul Waldman both went after Cotton for suggesting that terrorist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev could receive a $1,400 payment under Biden’s stimulus signed in March. But in a Jan. 6, 2022, update to the “fact-check,” The PostThe claim by Cotton that it was the wrongdoer partially repudiated 

Democrats in the Senate voted against a measure last year that would have prevented stimulus payments from going out to violent prisoners like Tsarnaev, who was responsible for the murder of three people and injuring more than 260 in a deadly bombing in 2013. “Every Democrat voted to send checks to prisoners, and every Republican voted to stop prisoners from getting checks,” Cotton said in a March 8 tweet. Kessler wrote one of his phony “fact-checks,” in part, going after Cotton’s March 8, 2021, warning, calling it “scaremongering” and “hyped up.” Waldman mocked Cotton for a March 6 tweet makingTsarnaev received the same warning. “The truth is that Cotton has no idea whether Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is going to get a relief check through the American Rescue Plan or not (it would depend on whether he filed a tax return recently),” Waldman bleated. However, it turned out that Cotton had been right all along. 

A newly released court document showed that Tsarnaev did, in fact, receive a $1,400 “COVID relief payment” on June 22, 2021, just over three months after Biden signed his stimulus into law. But in Waldman’s premature screed against Cotton’s warnings about Tsarnaev, “[T]This is more offensive than all of the faux-controversies about culture that Republicans are trying to create lately over everything, from Mr. Seuss to Dr. Seuss. Potato Head.”  

Kessler, on the other hand, had to revisit his “fact-check” after Cotton’s team emailed him demanding an update. “We take such requests seriously and are always willing to review a fact check in light of new information,” Kessler said in an attempt to salvage the error. He admitted that “in retrospect, the use of the phrase ‘scaremongering’ was inappropriate.” In addition, “The term ‘hyped up’ in the headline went too far as well,” Kessler said. Kessler’s update, however, was slapped on the bottom of his original article, leaving the original headline in place with no initial indication that the article had been corrected until the fifth paragraph which stated, “A new Pinocchio rating has been added to the 2021 fact-check.”

Kessler still tried to double-down by saying Cotton was fact-checked primarily because Cotton suggested that Tsarnaev getting COVID-19 relief funds was a result of “something Democrats did, when he had previously voted for legislation with the same language that allowed for checks to be issued to prisoners.” This is a very weak rebuttal. It was created to prevent payments being sent to prisoners. This is a solution to an issue Cotton has been unable to resolve. saidThis was implicitTwo other COVID-19 relief legislations were passed in 2020, which allegedly can only be fixed through litigation. In short, Democrats were against the GOP legislation to block COVID-19 funding going to criminals like Tsarnaev. Still, Kessler conceded that “Cotton’s predictive powers should be acknowledged. He said the Boston bomber would get a stimulus check — and Tsarnaev did.”

Conservatives under attack Contact The Washington Post at (202) 334-6000 and hold it to account for dismissing Cotton’s warnings last year.

 

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