NPR’s Pathetic ‘Fact-Check’ of Byron Donalds After Trump Inauguration

Even on Inauguration Day, you can count on taxpayer-funded National Public Radio to act like a hive of Democrats. It’s not surprising. As longtime NPR editor Uri Berliner reported last year, he investigated D.C. voting records and found “87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans.”

On “Morning Edition” before Donald Trump was sworn in, co-host Leila Fadel interviewed Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla. After some milder opening questions, Fadel turned to revenge: “President-elect Trump did promise dozens of times on the campaign trail that his rivals, critics, even some private citizens should be investigated, prosecuted, put in jail, or otherwise punished. Do these pardons and this peaceful transfer of power that’s happening today put an end to talk of revenge in politics?”

Donalds expressed concerns about preemptive pardons, calling out the House Jan. 6 committee, the Pelosi-Picked Panel: “What this really demonstrates is the fact that they knew that they were doing things that were wrong. No. 1, you’re not allowed to destroy evidence in a congressional hearing. That is against federal law. So, by Joe Biden providing these pardons to those staffers and, frankly, the members of those committee, he once again is subverting the law.”

Fadel tried to “fact-check” Donalds: “So far, we have no evidence that anything was destroyed.”

Then NPR doubled down later in the morning show. Fadel asked their White House correspondent Tamara Keith: “Earlier in the program, I asked Republican Congressman Byron Donalds of Florida in the House about these preemptive pardons. And he said, quote, ‘you’re not allowed to destroy evidence in a congressional hearing.’ Is there any truth to the insinuation that the select committee destroyed evidence?”

Keith repeated their error: “No, and this has been repeated by Trump and his allies. The reality is that that evidence has been properly archived with the National Archives. Not all of it was released publicly because it was sensitive.”

Democrats take issue with the word “destroyed.” Perhaps the word they could accept is the Democrats “failed to archive” their records. Is there a substantial difference for anyone wanting to review the committee’s actions?

In a Dec. 17 report, Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., reviewed the performance of the Pelosi-Picked Panel as chair of the Oversight Subcommittee of the House Administration Committee.

He found: “The Select Committee failed to archive or provide the Subcommittee with any of its video recordings of witness interviews, as many as 900 interview summaries or transcripts, more than one terabyte of digital data.”

How much is a terabyte? It is said a terabyte could hold 1,000 copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

There was also this revelation: “Concerningly, of the documents that were archived, the Select Committee delivered more than 100 encrypted, password protected documents and never provided the passwords.”

If Republicans had created a stacked committee with two very cooperative Democrats and didn’t allow the Democrat leadership to submit their own committee members, the Democrats and their media minions like NPR would have thoroughly probed their actions. But the NPR anchor acted like a babe in the woods who has never located or read Loudermilk’s report.

Sure enough, put the name “Barry Loudermilk” in the NPR.org search engine for the last year, and you get zero results—just like NPR has zero Republicans in editorial positions.

The Republican half of America is routinely abused and shafted by “public” radio and TV networks they are forced to subsidize. NPR and PBS can’t even be civil and factual on Inauguration Day. Their government funding should be immediately stopped. Let the Democrats and their affiliated billionaires pay for their own partisan propaganda.

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