Hours after President Trump unloaded on her Wednesday afternoon as “a corrupt reporter” who “never smiles” and her network as “crooked as hell” and “very corrupt,” CNN chief White House correspondent and The Source host Kaitlan Collins proved the President’s point about her turnabout from “conservative” to liberal media darling by battling Republican Congressman Mike Lawler of New York.
Discussing the status of Trump’s “anti-weaponization fund” to benefit those who believe they’ve been targeted unfairly by the federal government (which Collins had asked Trump about when the takedown took place), Lawler explained that while he wasn’t necessarily a supporter, “[t]here’s no question, by the way, that weaponization did occur under the Biden administration” as, for example, “[t]he Department of Justice call[ed] parents domestic terrorists for simply attending a school board meeting.”
“So, there’s no question that people were targeted by the Biden administration, and they should avail themselves of the legal process,” he added.
That was all it took for the former conservative to make a ridiculous left-wing analogy: “Hunter Biden might agree with you. He was prosecuted, of course, by his dad's own Justice Department.”
Lawler hit back with the obvious: “Yes, for crimes — for crimes that he — for crimes that he committed, Kaitlin. The Justice Department was not weaponized against Hunter Biden.”
Collins, needing a life preserver, turned to the left's favorite talking point of all: “Hold on. January 6 people, you're saying they didn't commit those crimes? They're on camera. [CHUCKLES] They did commit the crimes.”
Lawler fired back by making clear there is a world in which someone could believe both were wrong: “Kaitlin, respectfully, I've always said January 6 was wrong. I've always said that anybody that committed an act of violence on January 6th should be prosecuted. You threw Hunter Biden into the mix, trying to conflate all these things. Hunter Biden committed multiple crimes, including tax evasion, and had illegal possession of a gun. That's why he was prosecuted.”
Ouch! Then Collins mistakenly prolonged this debate:
COLLINS: Yeah. And the January 6 people were prosecuted because they rioted at the Capitol —
LAWLER: Right.
COLLINS: — and violated, I'm just saying —
LAWLER: — and — and those —
COLLINS: — I'm just saying that, when you're talking about weaponization —
LAWLER: — those that violently — those that violently acted on January 6th and assaulted police officers, in my opinion, were rightly prosecuted.
COLLINS: Right.
LAWLER: There are others that were prosecuted on January 6th that should not have been, and that is an individual case-by-case basis.
Collins then shifted to Trump's settlement with the IRS:
COLLINS: Do you support the fact that the addendum to that whole agreement that says the IRS can't audit the President or his family for past tax issues, that still stands. Are you okay with that?
LAWLER: There is no question that the IRS, there was a situation there — where there was an illegal leak of the President's tax returns, and he filed a claim, which he certainly has the right to do when the government is weaponized against him. From that vantage point of looking back at his tax — taxes from years or decades back, no, I don't have a problem with that stand.
Collins kept pressing, and she would again make Trump's earlier point about her by leaning wholly into the corrupt world of The Swamp and refusing to entertain even the slightest notion of Washington agencies unjustly targeting anyone:
COLLINS: So, you're okay with him having immunity for those past audits?
LAWLER: Yeah, well —
COLLINS: Because every president gets audited pretty much.
LAWLER: — they were previously — they were previously audited, and they didn't find anything. So, obviously, there's nothing really to review going backward, and the fact is —
COLLINS: I don't think we know if that's true though —
LAWLER: — the fact is —
COLLINS: — that they didn't find anything.
LAWLER: — well, you certainly don't know that they did. And the fact is, if they did, the Biden administration, as we saw, would have tried to prosecute him on that if there was something there.
One might think that following her experience in the Oval Office earlier that day, Collins would have gone out of her way to try to prove Trump wrong. Instead, she seemed to have been trying to do the opposite.
