New York Attorney General Letitia James is a Democrat who was elected on her promise to prosecute “illegitimate” President Donald Trump. In other words, she was a super-charged partisan. But the partisan leftist media regularly dropped the (D) – and the E, as in elected. A low-information voter would think she was nonpartisan. That’s still happening.
On the front page of Friday’s New York Times, they were clearly upset James was indicted for mortgage fraud, as Trump desired. They brought the all-caps treatment:
JAMES IS INDICTED AS TRUMP PURSUES POLITICAL RIVALS
On Heels of Comey, Justice Dept. Targets Attorney General of New York
At least now, James is a “political rival” – but in the paper, there was still no party label for James in the entire article.
In the breaking-news article online, you can see the D in paragraph 4, which begins: “In a statement, Ms. James, a Democrat who had won a civil case against Mr. Trump accusing him of fraudulently inflating the value of his assets…” But in the On Dead Tree version, it’s not there. How bizarre.
Reporters Devlin Barrett, Glenn Thrush and Jonah Bromwich singled out Trump as unique in manipulating the Justice Department: “The prosecutions have ushered in a turbulent era at a Justice Department increasingly under the direct command of a president intent on using federal law enforcement to prosecute his adversaries, shield his supporters and redefine criminality as it suits his interests.”
The trio also strangely threw the word “perceived,” as if Trump is imagining James was trying to ruin him:
Mr. Trump has escalated his campaign against his perceived rivals in recent weeks, pressing publicly for the U.S. attorney’s office to pursue Ms. James and Mr. Comey.
This is like writing The New York Times is a “perceived” opponent of Trump. This was repeated in a short piece by Alan Feuer and Lily Boyce that accompanied a graphic: “From the moment Donald J. Trump began his campaign to return to the White House, he has expressed a clear desire to seek vengeance against his perceived enemies.” The graphic also had no label for James or her fellow partisan prosecutor Fani Willis in Georgia.
Also in Friday’s paper, buried in page A-15, is the first Times story on the nasty kill-the-Republican texts from Virginia Attorney General candidate Jay Jones. It’s a full week after the story broke. Cub reporter Chris Hippensteel quickly turned to explaining Trump’s role in the nasty political climate in paragraphs 5 and 6:
The emergence of the incendiary texts, first reported by National Review, comes as the country is grappling with the growing specter of political violence, particularly since the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. In June, Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman, a Democrat, and her husband were killed at their home in a Minneapolis suburb, and last month the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, a close ally of President Trump’s, was killed at a college in Utah.
Discourse in American politics has turned increasingly vulgar in the decade since Donald J. Trump launched his first bid for the White House, as he made coarse insults and brazen threats part of his public rhetoric, and others followed his lead.
Nasty talk? Trump started it.
