Senator Josh Hawley who seems to be eyeing a presidential run in
2024 has decided to launch a gross and incredibly dishonest attack
against Biden Supreme Court nominee Ken Tangie Brown Jackson.
Now it's really a historic event here because she is the first African American
judge to be considered for the Supreme Court and if of course she's confirmed,
she would be the first black female judge in the Supreme Court.
But Josh Hawley has decided to launch this attack through a 17 tweet
thread where he accuses her of being soft on child predators essentially.
And again, before we even get to the details and
we're gonna debunk what he has to say.
But I wanna be abundantly clear that it is a dishonest attack where he goes out of
his way to even take her out of context.
So I'm gonna give you a few of the tweets,
he says I've been researching the record of Judge Jackson Browne,
reading her opinions, articles, interviews and speeches.
I've noticed an alarming pattern when it comes to Judge Jackson's treatment of
sex offenders, especially those preying on children,
notably Josh Hawley was not a vocal opponent of Alabama's Roy Moore who was
accused by several women of molesting them when they were teenagers,
not a peep, not a peep from Josh Hawley on that.
Instead he has decided to use this as a political opportunity to unfairly
attack a judge and take her out of context.
He says that Judge Jackson has a pattern of letting child porn offenders off
the hook for their appalling crimes, both as a judge and as a policy maker,
she's been advocating for it since law school.
This goes beyond soft on crime.
I'm concerned that this is a record that endangers our children.
Now we're gonna debunk a lot of what he says here.
Before we do though, I just wanna also mention that it's not just people on
the left going after Hawley for this dishonest attack.
You have conservatives as well, including conservative columnist and
former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy who attacked Hawley for
what he said was a meritless accusations against Judge Brown Jackson.
And so before we get to the details and debunking what Hawley is doing here,
Ida wanted to give you an opportunity to jump in.
>> So black women must be tired.
They've got to be exhausted because the continuous
attacks on black women is just egregious.
I think that we've reached the point where in US politics that
we've gone beyond the lack of shame and it is embarrassing globally
to where the lengths that some of these politicians will go.
But I'm just severely concerned of what message this is sending to
our children actually because this guy was the one that fist bumped,
that was the guy with the black leather glove during the terrorist
attack in Washington DC on January 6th.
And I just think that it's gotten to the point where now we've always known
politics and politics can get ugly but now it's dirty beyond measure.
And if you're an American and you care anything about what America is
supposed to stand for, you should be severely concerned about these people
whether they are on the right or the left because this is concerning and
it's infuriating black women or had to feed white babies during slavery.
And here we are still bailed out these people us during this last election,
this black woman who has, there are other things you can actually
rightfully take issue with when it comes to her, but
to make stuff up is just the lowest of the low and you can't ride with these people.
>> And he definitely made stuff up.
Took her out of context,
made it seem like her opinions on sentencing were somehow unique or
stood out compared to what other judges believed, which was not in any way true.
In fact the former prosecutor, the conservative prosecutor
that I was just referring to who has condemned Hawley here
also said that Judge Brown Jackson was actually in line.
He agreed with her views on mandatory minimums and
she was very much in line with what the majority of judges believed at the time,
I'm gonna give you those details in a second.
But again it was a 17 tweet thread and
I think that Glenn Kessler over at the Washington post did
a good job going tweet by tweet and debunking all of it.
I'm gonna pick out the ones that we can talk about now,
we can't go through all of it, it's gonna take up the whole show.
So that's why I'm citing Kessler, you guys should check out what he has to say.
But he also writes that the picture that Hawley provides is a selective one that
lacks significant context.
He suggests that Jackson is out of the judicial mainstream with her sentencing of
child pornography defendants, but he ignores a long debate
within the judicial community about whether mandatory minimums were too high.
And you had judges on both sides of the political aisle agreeing that
the mandatory minimums were too high.
Now, in one tweet, this is what Polly had written.
Judge Jackson has said that some people who possessed child porn are in this for
either the collection or the people who are loners and
find status in their participation in the community.
What community would that be?
The community of child exploiters?
Now, he made it seem like that was her entire quote.
Of course, he took that completely out of context.
In reality, Jackson was just asking a follow up question to a witness who
had spoken of an online community.
I'm gonna give you the entirety of her statement,
which of course you didn't get from Hawley's tweets.
I was just going to say as a follow up to that MS McCarthy, is it your
experience that this category of non sexually motivated child pornography
offenders is very small because you had them broken out in your slide.
The non sexually motivated and that I found just so
interesting because I assumed that everyone who was involved in
this kind of activity was sexually motivated.
So the people who are in this for either the collection or
the people who are loners and find status and their participation in the community
but would be categorized as non sexually motivated.
How many are we talking about?
I mean, the context is so
important, but of course he cherry picked a small portion of that statement.
Small portion of that question in order to make it appear as though
she's a somehow empathetic to child sex predators or people who are looking and
sharing child pornography.
>> You know what it does though.
It is a constant reminder that the people who are in
the Republican Party believed that their constituents are idiots and
nobody insults their intelligence more than these people.
Because if you saw that and I know he saw the whole question and
told one of the interns, hey, just take this part out and put it out there.
Basically what he's saying is they'll buy it, they're gonna feed into it.
They already hate her because she's a black woman because these people
are the people that hate everybody that does not look like them.
>> They're already predisposed to QAnon type conspiracy theories about
the left protecting child predators and things like that.
>> In addition to that, and so that it is just an insult.
And I know some of you hate watch but just think about it.
They know you're not gonna go beyond this tweet and do the research and
go get the information to find out what she really said or really did.
So they just are now chopping up this information.
This minimal stuff.
The Clickbait because they know you're gonna put on a T shirt,
you're gonna take your mask off, you're not gonna get vaccinated and
you're gonna roll out there and you're gonna have
a fight on behalf of these talking points without knowing what's going on.
And that to me is an insult.
>> I mean what I'm curious about is why didn't Josh Hawley bring up
Amy Coney Barrett's relationship and inclusion within the catholic church.
She's a catholic, right?
Was that problematic at all for Hawley?
Considering all of the child sex abuse scandals that came out of the catholic
church.
Now honestly the left wouldn't think about that line of
questioning because the left doesn't play dirty like that, okay?
They might bring up what happened to Brett Kavanaugh, but
Brett Kavanaugh had legitimate accusations of attempted rape against him.
In this case we're talking about a judge who did nothing wrong.
We're talking about a judge who is taken out of context.
Look not to win any political brownie points for the right but
to win political Brownie points for one specific person and that's Josh Hawley.
He's just trying to appeal to Cunanan conspiracy theorists,
the worst elements of society who have bought into the most dangerous conspiracy
theories in order to increase his chances of winning a presidential primary in 2024.
It's just incredibly gross.
I wanted to give one other example by the way.
So here's one is one of his other tweets where he says Judge Jackson
has opined there may be a type of less serious child pornography
offender whose motivation is not sexual but is the challenge or
to use the technology a less serious child porn offender he asks.
Okay well that's another example of her asking a question in
response to testimony that she found surprising.
So let me give you her question in its full context.
Did I just read this already.
Okay, sorry about that.
Okay, so let's go to graphic seven.
I was just surprised at some testimony with respect to the motivation of
offenders and that there are people who get involved in this kind of activity,
who may not be pedophiles, who may not be necessarily interested really in
the child pornography, but have other motivations with respect to the use
of the technology and the being in that group.
And there are lots of reasons perhaps why people might engage in this.
And so I'm wondering whether you could say that there could be a less serious
child pornography offender who is engaging in this type of conduct in the group
experience level because their motivation is the challenge or to use the technology.
They're very sophisticated technologically, but
they aren't necessarily that interested in the child pornography piece of it.
She's asking a question to a witness in a case.
But again, the full context was completely left out by Josh Hawley who by the way,
is not apologetic at all for taking her out of context, lying about her just so
he can win political brownie points with conspiracy theorists.
>> And what the thing about it,
that people don't know that the average person doesn't know.
And it took a while for me to know is that litigators have to ask
the uncomfortable and the questions because their job is to find
out what's happening in accordance to the law.
And a lot of the language that is used, that is not common for
us who are not litigators can be very confusing to add to the average
person in the average mind and that is their job when they are in
the courtroom to ask the questions that are going to uphold the law.
And so she is doing her job in this and
here he is taking her words out of context, making it something that is not.
And now it's a bunch of people who have we have information,
don't know what's going on are already angry because of whatever belief
that they have about what's being taken from them and now this just feeds it.
>> Absolutely.
And look I think context matters in every situation, in every situation.
People will argue context doesn't matter.
I've seen arguments like that on the left as well, context matters okay?
It just does.
Pretending as if that doesn't matter that the intentions of an individual who says
something that you don't like doesn't matter.
>> That is a toxic society to live in where were needlessly going after
innocent people who might be making a point that you actually agree with and
that's what Hawley was doing in this particular case in this effort to
smear her as someone who's soft on child predators.
It's disgusting.
And then by the way,
one other thing I wanna quickly address is the fact that he again pretends as
though she really stood out in wanting to lower the mandatory minimums.
But no, that was actually a bipartisan effort by the US sentencing committee.
So what's missing here and this is according to Glenn Kessler's piece is that
the US sentencing committee is bipartisan.
No more than four members of the seven member sentencing committee can be from
one party and
that the recommendations that Hawley criticizes were actually unanimous.
One member who signed off on the report was Debney L Friedrich,
later nominated in 2017 by Donald Trump to be a federal district judge.
Hawley was not in the Senate then but
every Republican actually supported her nomination.
And also a 2010 survey showed that 71% of judges said that
the mandatory minimums for receipt of images were too high.
So I would venture to say there were a lot of Republican judges included in
that equation.
But Hawley left that out as well.