Tulsi Gabbard has broken the Daily Beast

AP Photo/John Minchillo

The amount of hand-wringing that’s been going on in the press over Tulsi Gabbard lately has been either highly entertaining or seriously alarming, depending on your personal perspective. What everyone claims to be so upset about is the fact that Gabbard expressed alarm over revelations that biological research laboratories in Ukraine (“biolabs”) which have received funding from the United States Government contain dangerous pathogens and they might either be compromised in the fighting or even be taken over by the Russian invaders. Those statements were almost immediately declared to be “Russian disinformation” in the press and among her fellow Democrats. Her statements were somehow warped into claims that she said the United States was “running” some sort of biological weapons laboratories (“bioweapons labs”) in Ukraine. The White House and their defenders in the MSM have worked overtime to state that we are operating no such bioweapons labs in Ukraine, despite nobody – including Tulsi Gabbard – ever claiming that we did.

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But simply mangling Gabbard’s statements and lying about what she said wasn’t enough for some of her critics. The Daily Beast decided to do some deep digging, fervently hoping to come up with some sort of evidence that Gabbard is an undercover Putin puppet on the payroll of the Kremlin. What they came up with was a pair of campaign contributions to Gabbard’s ill-fated presidential primary run from a woman accused of being a Russian agent totaling roughly $59. This was then blown up as some sort of evidence of Russian collusion. This prompted Gabbard to return to the Tucker Carlson show to set the record straight, causing the people at the Daily Beast to basically lose their minds.

“You saw headlines a couple of days ago: ‘Tulsi Gabbard Paid Off By Russian Agents,’” the former Democratic candidate said. “What the media is lying about is the fact that an American citizen gave my campaign a $59 contribution coming from a woman I’ve never met, someone I don’t know, I don’t know anything about, but somehow they feel justified in saying, ‘Tulsi Gabbard is being paid off.’”

Gabbard, who has parroted the Russian government’s stance on its invasion of Ukraine so well that she has been cited approvingly by Russian state television, then accused the press of somehow threatening the U.S. government.

“The danger in the media lying so blatantly to the American people—these so-called journalists who have a responsibility to the public—it poses a very direct threat to our democratic republic because they continue to get away with it,” Gabbard asserted, sounding more and more like Carlson. “They continue to parrot and propagate these lies and they need to be held accountable. They need to be exposed.”

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The truly amazing thing about this latest Daily Beast article is that they essentially did nothing but cover the allegations that Gabbard made against them. While the tone was mocking, what TDB failed to do was refute a single one of Gabbard’s charges. And that’s understandable since they really can’t refute things that turned out to be absolutely true.

It’s an established fact that Elena Branson made two small-dollar donations to Gabbard’s primary campaign. Why she did it is not known but perhaps someone can ask her if the law ever catches up with her. But the point is, does anyone seriously believe that Russia thought they could buy off a potential presidential candidate (if an extremely long-shot prospect) for fifty-nine bucks? And that’s all the Daily Beast managed to come up with.

Just for the record, neither Gabbord nor Tucker Carlson pulled the information under discussion out of thin air. Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland said under oath that the biolabs in question are indeed in operation in Ukraine and our government is worried that they might be compromised leading to the potential release of deadly pathogens. On top of that, Robert Pope of the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s Cooperative Threat Reduction Program confirmed not only the existence of the labs but of Soviet-era bioweapons that were being studied and disposed of.

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In other words, everything that Tulsi Gabbard actually said was true. But the Biden administration and its staunch defenders in the MSM have fallen back on the old trick of answering questions that nobody asked, such as the issue of the supposed bioweapons labs that Gabbard never once mentioned.

In case you haven’t seen it, here’s the brief appearance that Gabbard had on Carlson’s show to discuss accusations from everyone ranging from Mitt Romney to the Morning Joe Crew about how Gabbard is a treasonous liar promoting Russian disinformation or whatever. It’s all a bit much to swallow.

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Ed Morrissey 12:40 PM | November 21, 2024
David Strom 11:20 AM | November 21, 2024
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