Well if it isn’t the pot calling the kettle black.
The Huffington Post on Monday accused The Washington Post of distorting key facts in a “bombshell report” on the Trump Administration’s alleged crackdown on passport applications in South Texas.
The WaPo article defends its claim by pointing to the increased scrutiny of Latino birth certificates and the midwives who signed them as well as the increased number of passport denials to individuals born near the Texas/Mexico border.
The problem with this claim is that both policies predate Trump’s election.
The Post also points to the investigation of Texas doctor Jorge Treviño, who delivered more than 15,000 babies during his career working in the Rio Grande Valley. Treviño came under federal scrutiny in 2015 after he was accused of falsifying birth certificates.
It was eventually discovered that the issues with Treviño’s birth certificates were related to poor record-keeping, not fraud. Either way, the investigation occurred before Trump was elected.
Not to mention Treviño passed away in 2015.
“We don’t know and have never heard…of anyone from his office doing anything illegal,” said Treviño’s daughter Marianna. “For this to surface three years after he’s dead…unless the State Department or the lawyers are going to produce the affidavit, it might as well be a fairy tale.”
Marianna attempted to speak with the Post the day the story was published, but did not receive a call for nearly two weeks.
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The Post’s report also fails to line up with official data from the State Department regarding the number of passport denials in suspect midwife cases in South Texas.
“The Trump Administration is accusing hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Hispanics along the border of using fraudulent birth certificates since they were babies, and it is undertaking a widespread crackdown,” wrote the Post.
In reality, the number of passport denials has dropped from 1,465 in 2015 to 971 last year. As of last month, the State Department was on track to end this year with even fewer denials.
The Post’s article does not include these numbers.
WaPo officials claimed the State Department’s data was inaccurate because it did not include cases involving delayed birth certificates and cases where births were recorded in both the US and Mexico. Lawyers quoted in the Post’s article conveniently shared the paper’s skepticism about the government’s statistics.
“As it stands, the Post’s report remains misleading,” concludes HuffPost. “It relies on anecdotal evidence to make an explosive claim that’s contradicted by official data – and doesn’t make that fact clear. It implies that years-old practices are new. And the paper consistently refused to correct the record unless it was called out by other reporters.”
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The WaPo story has been altered at least three times since its original publication on August 29th.
Editor’s note: It’s amazing to me that they can do this right in front of people’s noses, and liberals still believe everything they say.