Karine Jeane-Pierre, President Biden’s incoming White House press secretary, has faced scrutiny over resurfaced tweets in which she claimed elections were stolen from Democrats.
SO WHAT
THE NEW RULES: It’s okay to say an election was stolen, if your name isn’t Donald Trump.
THE TWEETS
Jeane-Pierre has repeatedly used her Twitter account to promote the dubious allegations that Trump’s 2016 presidential election victory and 2018 Brian Kemp’s Georgia gubernatorial win were illegitimate.
TRUMP: In December in 2016, shortly after Trump’s shock defeat of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, Jeane-Pierre suggested it was a “stolen election.”
A year later, Jeane-Pierre tweeted that Trump was a “a deplorable illegitimate president.”
KEMP: In March 2019 and April 2020, Jeane-Pierre directly stated that the governorship was stolen from Democratic nominee Stacey Abrams.
SAME ENERGY
Clinton and Abrams have both insisted their races were rigged against them.
- “You can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you can have the election stolen from you,” Clinton said in Los Angeles in May 2019, during her “Evening with the Clintons” tour.
- “[Kemp] “won under the rules of the game at the time, but the game was rigged against the voters of Georgia,” Abrams told CNN in December, re-upping her longstanding refusal to recognize the governor’s legitimacy.
THE DOUBLE STANDARD
Trump’s unproven claims that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him have been endlessly fact-checked and denounced in the mainstream media as a dire threat to democracy.
- Social media companies have cited the “Big Lie” to justify banning Trump and other conservatives from their platforms to this day.
Meanwhile, democracy-doubting Democrats like Clinton and Abrams have continued to be treated like media darlings.
- Pierre is set to take over for outgoing White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Friday.
