Washington Post Outs the Source Behind the Fake Trump Quotes

The Washington Post has outed its source who provided them with the bogus Trump quotes in their January 9 article, “Trump pressured a Georgia elections investigator in a separate call legal experts say could amount to obstruction.” The story was recently updated with a correction after a recording of the call was discovered and published by the Wall Street Journal.

“The Washington Post reported on the substance of Trump’s Dec. 23 call in January, describing him saying that [Georgia election investigator Frances] Watson should ‘find the fraud’ and that she would be a ‘national hero,’ based on an account from Jordan Fuchs, the deputy secretary of state, whom Watson briefed on his comments,” the Washington Post‘s Erik Wemple reported Tuesday.

Fuchs defended her actions, saying that her words were an interpretation, and not meant to be direct quotes.

“I believe the story accurately reflected the investigator’s interpretation of the call. The only mistake here was in the direct quotes, and they should have been more of a summary,” Fuchs told Wemple. “I think it’s pretty absurd for anybody to suggest that the president wasn’t urging the investigator to ‘find the fraud.’ These are quotes that [Watson] told me at the time.”

Fuchs was not identified in the original story, but referred to as “an individual familiar with the call who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the conversation.”

The Washington Post also refutes the notion they’ve retracted the story. In a statement, the Post says, “We corrected the story and published a separate news story last week — at the top of our site and on the front page — after we learned that our source had not been precise in relaying then President Trump’s words. We are not retracting our January story because it conveyed the substance of Trump’s attempt to influence the work of Georgia’s elections investigators.”

_____

Matt Margolis is the author of Airborne: How The Liberal Media Weaponized The Coronavirus Against Donald Trump, and the bestselling book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter, Gab, Facebook, MeWe, Heroes, Rumble, and CloutHub.