Regular readers know I’m not a fan of Philip Bump. He occasionally publishes something interesting but for the most part he behaves like a dedicated partisan who refuses to acknowledge when he’s wrong. For instance, Bump wrote not one but two articles back in 2020 claiming that AG Bill Barr had instructed security forces to clear protesters for a Trump photo op. This was briefly an important story for the left because they could blame Trump for the use of tear gas on peaceful protesters, making him once again a villain.

When the Interior Department’s Inspector General released a report on the events that day, the report concluded Barr’s visit and Trump’s photo op had nothing to do with clearing the park. In fact, the effort to clear the park was already underway by the time Barr came outside. This is from the IG’s report:

We also found no evidence that the Attorney General’s visit to Lafayette Park at 6:10 p.m. caused the USPP to alter its plans to clear the park. Both the USPP incident and operations commanders told us that the USPP had initiated the plan to clear Lafayette Park before the Attorney General arrived and that his presence had no influence on the USPP’s timeline or decisions. The evidence we reviewed also confirmed that the plan to disperse the protesters was underway before the Attorney General arrived in Lafayette Park. For example, the radio logs established that the law enforcement units were moving into position at least 20 minutes before the Attorney General arrived in the park and that the USPP incident commander completed drafting the dispersal warnings approximately 6 minutes before the Attorney General arrived in the park…No one we interviewed stated that the USPP cleared the park because of a potential visit by the President or that the USPP altered the timeline to accommodate the President’s movement.

In sum, the entire Trump-gassed-people-for-a-photo-op story, which Bump personally helped support, was false. But Bump couldn’t let it go and wrote a piece which, instead of simply admitting he was wrong, mostly tried to argue that it could still be true that Barr’s visit had something to do with the timing.

Last December Bump wrote another extremely misleading and pedantic article claiming that the US had never really experienced a Covid lockdown.

Over the past three years, the idea that the United States had a system of “lockdowns” has persisted, and an array of responses to the virus has been loosely grouped under that umbrella: remote schooling, restaurant closings, restrictions on entering facilities.

As I pointed out at the time, everyone in the US and Europe was referring to what was going on in the west as lockdowns, including everyone in the media. I was able to find 8 different articles published in 2020 by the Washington Post (Bump’s employer) which used the word “lockdown” in the headline. I also found an article written by Bump himself in which he used the word the same way. Needless to say, his argument that the word “lockdown” was part of a dastardly partisan plot didn’t hold up to any scrutiny at all.

This week, Bump appeared on a podcast where he was asked about evidence Joe Biden may have been involved in his son’s business ventures. Bump apparently lost his mind:

With his voice rising to soprano levels of panic and arms flailing, he was a man in distress for much of the hour-plus podcast.

“I just I’m gonna lose my mind. I’m gonna lose my mind,” Bump says at one point, when Dworman is pressing him on Archer’s testimony that Hunter would get his father on the speakerphone to talk to overseas business partners about the “weather.”…

Instead of explaining how he reached his conclusions, Dworman’s forensic questions just made Bump frantic.

“There’s just no point, because all you want to do is you want to have me here as the putative expert so that you can present me with things that have been debunked multiple times that I’ve written about.”

Dworman: “What’s been debunked?”

Bump: “These, these claims. I’ve written about this, this argument about his dad calling him. I’ve written about this. Did you read what I wrote?”

Dworman: “It’s not debunked. Neither of us were there.”

Here’s a bit of the interview in which ace analyst P. Bump suddenly has no opinions about a text message which seems to undermine his theory that there’s no there there.

Here’s @pbump’s response to a simple question from @noam_dworman about what he as a journalist thinks of Hunter Biden’s text message to his adult daughter explaining that he has to give half his income to his father. The lack of curiosity is stunning. https://t.co/HuXKIMUVhC pic.twitter.com/Aa4dXZ6HJR

— a newsman (@a_newsman) September 1, 2023

That clip above comes from the very end of an hour long discussion where Bump was conceding that, in the future, it was possible there might be evidence Biden took money. But his point, which he didn’t quite finish, was that there is no such evidence now. Dworman interjected by asking about the text where Hunter said Joe was making him give over half his money. That seems like circumstantial evidence but Bump has no reaction and no interest in exploring what it might mean. Here’s the full interview so you can judge for yourself.

Update: It’s pretty instructive to compare the P. Bump who wrote this long story that maybe he was still kinda sorta right about the Bill Barr story. Here’s a sample which, again, he wrote after the IG report said definitively (see above) that what Bump is implying here did not happen.

So were those people going to be there when the president came out? Trump was supposed to start speaking at 6:15, four minutes after the encounter between Barr and the commander. Barr said more than one thing; did he also point out that time was running short? Is that why his aide looked at his watch?

We don’t know Barr’s side of the story because the inspector general’s report focused only on the conduct of the U.S. Park Police (USPP), the organization that falls within the Interior Department’s mandate. Many other agencies were on the scene that day, including Bureau of Prisons officers — airdropped in by the Justice Department in response to the ongoing protests — and the Secret Service. Most of the officers there were under Park Police direction (except the Secret Service) but the inspector general only “sought interviews and information from individuals outside of the USPP when doing so would provide us with information about the agency’s USPP’s activities. Accordingly, we did not seek to interview Attorney General William Barr, White House personnel, Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) officers, [D.C. Metropolitan Police (MPD)] personnel, or Secret Service personnel regarding their independent decisions that did not involve the USPP.”

Five minutes after Barr and the commander spoke, uniformed Secret Service officers briefly began pushing the crowd back.

He’s literally parsing the body language of Barr’s aide (Is that why his aide looked at his watch?). He’s doing all he can to suggest Barr played a role contrary to the IG report’s firm conclusions.

Now compare that P. Bump to the guy in the video above. In that clip above he’s not interested in interpretations or speculation, only in facts which have been established beyond all doubt. He’s a completely different person on this story than he was on the Barr story. That fact that he doesn’t realize it is the problem with his work. He doesn’t seem to know that he’s using two different standards depending entirely, it seems to me, on whose ox is being gored.