Facing a lawsuit after she spread defamatory falsehoods on Twitter, Rep. Ilhan Omar on Wednesday deleted a tweet without explanation or apology.
In her tweet, Omar had actually defended the racist, homophobic Black Hebrew Israelites who taunted the Covington Catholic High School students in Washington, D.C., last Friday for two full hours.
So @IlhanMN just quietly deleted this tweet where she literally lies about everything to smear Covington students even though there's clear video evidence.
Don't worry though, I archived it for you all and it's never going away.
The internet is forever.https://t.co/fdOXWBaOAd pic.twitter.com/5mC23Xa6ez
— Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) January 23, 2019
Omar was wrong about virtually all of that except the bit about the PR firm. Nicholas Sandmann’s family did hire a PR firm to help them get their message out to a largely hostile media.
The Covington kids had just participated in the March for Life, not a “protest of a woman’s right to choose.” While a short video taken of a group of teens shows a confrontation with protesters where a boy makes a joke about rape, the kid reportedly doesn’t even attend Covington Catholic High School.
The Covington boys were not taunting the black separatists, they were trying to drown out the black separatists‘ racist taunts with school cheers. They didn’t surround Phillips — he walked into their midst, loudly beating a drum and chanting. And they did not respond with any “racist chants.”
Phillips went on to misrepresent everything that happened to the media, which dutifully ran with his false claims without bothering to verify them.
After lawyer Robert Barnes, who is representing the families of the Covington Catholic boys, warned Omar about being held legally culpable for the false claims in her tweet, she quickly deleted it.
This is libel. Retract, or get sued. https://t.co/18DO7vHOLN
— Robert Barnes (@Barnes_Law) January 23, 2019
Omar later tried to shame conservatives who were sharing screenshots of her hateful tweet:
Apparently she is just deleting all her tweets now. Maybe the preferable way to do this is to think before you tweet? pic.twitter.com/F4bNy8GR7t
— (((AG))) (@AGHamilton29) January 23, 2019
She later deleted that one too.
You have a large platform and posted false smears against kids. The correct fix was to post a correction and screenshot so that your followers would know you were wrong, not simply delete the tweet after tens of thousands of shares and pretend it never happened. https://t.co/a2PMHk23c9
— (((AG))) (@AGHamilton29) January 23, 2019
Barnes has given journalists, news outlets, and celebrities until Friday to either retract and apologize for posting falsehoods about the Covington Catholic boys or face legal action.
Barnes received a bomb threat on Wednesday afternoon, hours after he gave the media a 48-hour notice to correct the record.
The emailed threat said, “I am coming to bomb your office. Get ready. 48 hours. Be ready.”
Barnes said that the threat “shows how dangerous the establishment press can be when it excites madness with libelous lies.” He added that “if the goal was to deter me in helping these families, it had the opposite effect.”
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