FROM EIR DAILY ALERT
Wild Smear against Catholic Students—and by Implication President Trump—Exposed as Hoax
Jan. 22, 2019 (EIRNS)—Over the past 48 hours, coming on top of BuzzFeed’s garbage story Jan. 18, claiming President Donald Trump told his lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress, another fabricated story cropped up in a doctored video Jan. 19, purporting to show students from the Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky, wearing “MAGA” hats, allegedly confronting an innocent Native American, Nathan Phillips, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.
The video went viral, was tweeted and gotten out nationally, if not internationally, by other social media as well, unleashing wild attacks on the students, including death threats and other harassment, such that the school campus had to be shut down to protect them. Frenzied media, Hollywood celebrities, talk show hosts, and other Trump-hating networks ran with the doctored video and concluded that the students were Trump supporters, and reflected his “racist” views.
The whole thing was a lie. As a longer, accurate video subsequently showed, the students, who were waiting for their bus after attending the Right to Life March on Friday, were being harassed by wackos from the Black Israelite group, who called them “racists,” “white crackers,” “bigots,” “school shooters,” etc. The students responded with their school spirit chants, normally sung at sporting events. Phillips walked right up into the middle of the Covington group, banging a drum and chanting the entire time, into the face of Nick Sandmann, who was later accused of “harassing” Phillips. In a statement published by the Cincinnati Enquirer, Sandmann recounted that at no time did he, or any other student, respond to Phillips, even though Native American protesters yelled epithets at the students. Phillips lied to the press that the students blocked his “escape,” and chanted “Build the Wall,” both false, as seen in the full video. Sandmann decried the “mob-like character assassination” to which he and his family have been subjected.
Trump tweeted this morning that Nick Sandmann and the students of Covington “have become symbols of Fake News and how evil it can be.”
