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  • 2018-10-08 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Nancy Pelosi Admit Democrats Use a Tactic Called the 'Wrap-Up Smear?' (en)
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  • President Trump's second nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, was confirmed by the Senate in October 2018 after a contentious hearing process upended by allegations of sexual assault and a supplementary investigation by the FBI. Kavanaugh's accuser, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, testified under oath that he had sexually assaulted her at a party in 1982, an accusation the nominee vehemently denied. The FBI failed to corroborate Ford's testimony, paving the way for a close, largely party line vote in favor of confirmation on 6 October. All along, partisan supporters of Kavanaugh had portrayed Dr. Ford as a dupe, at best, in an alleged conspiracy by Democrats to derail the nomination by smearing his reputation. The day Kavanaugh was confirmed, a video clip began making the rounds in which House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-California) could allegedly be heard revealing the Democratic Party's template for such attacks, a tactic she called the wrap-up smear: A version of the clip also appeared on hyperpartisan websites such as InfoWars.com, where it accompanied an article saying that Pelosi's description was eerily similar to what we saw happen to Justice Brett Kavanaugh: The clips are authentic in the respect that they were extracted from an actual C-SPAN video of Pelosi's weekly press briefing on 22 June 2017, but seriously misleading in the respect that they were trimmed in such a way as to omit their original context. As a longer clip and transcript clearly show, Pelosi was calling out Republicans for conducting wrap-up smear campaigns, not touting the phenomenon as a go-to strategy for Democrats: In fact, this wasn't the first time Pelosi brought up the term wrap-up smear specifically to describe Republican political tactics. In this 6 March 2017 exchange between Pelosi and CNN news anchor Jake Tapper, she claimed President Trump used such a smear tactic against former president Barack Obama: We were unable to find any instances of Pelosi's stating or advocating that Democrats use such a tactic. (en)
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