Left-Wing Advocacy Group Shops Dishonest Hit Piece On Trump Campaign Staffer
American Bridge, a left-wing super PAC associated with Media Matters, is trying to take down a top Trump campaign staffer with out-of-context blog posts. An article published in Talking Points Memo (TPM) on Friday accused Matt Wolking, a Trump campaign communications staffer, of publishing “Islamophobic content and conspiracy theories” on his personal blog between 2008 and 2011. “In an archived version of the site accessible via the Internet Archive, Wolking said over 90 million Muslims were ‘murderous thugs,’ voiced support for banning the construction of mosques, and compared the passage of the Affordable Care Act to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks,” TPM claimed. However, most of the posts included in the article are wildly misrepresented, and TPM admits in the article that American Bridge “flagged” the blog for them.
For example, TPM claims in the headline on its piece that Wolking “called Muslims ‘murderous thugs.'” But Wolking was referring specifically to the seven percent of Muslims polled by Gallup who said the 9/11 terrorist attacks were “completely justified.” Wolking, who wrote the majority of the posts while in college, also did not “[voice] support for banning the construction of mosques.” Instead, Wolking was writing about a Church of England leader’s concerns about Sharia law and “no-go zones.” TPM also calls it “eyebrow raising” that Wolking compared the passage of the American Care Act to 9/11, but the website did not cover Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton comparing Russian meddling and the Mueller report to the terror attacks on New York. TPM also accused the right of being “hysterical” over Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar’s description of 9/11 as “some people did something.” In terms of Wolking’s blog peddling “conspiracy theories,” a source points out that the blog specifically denounced 9/11 trutherism, claims that former President Barack Obama was not born in the United States, and theories that Obama was a secret Muslim.
Trump 2020 Deputy Communications Director Erin Perrine responded to TPM’s article, stating, “It’s pathetic that the third-rate Democrat opposition research firm American Bridge is now spending time combing through decade-old, college-era WordPress blogs looking for things to distort, and that they finally found someone in the media willing to play along.” A source on the Trump campaign told The Daily Caller that American Bridge tried to shop the blog posts to The Washington Post and The Daily Beast, but only TPM was interested in running them.
American Bridge is a liberal Super PAC that was founded by David Brock in 2010. Brock is also the founder of Media Matters, a liberal “media watchdog” group that routinely organizes advertiser boycotts against conservative television hosts. Bradley Beychok, the president of American Bridge, is the former president of Media Matters. Media Matters’ current president, Angelo Carusone, came under fire in March over his own history of offensive blog posts. Carusone authored several posts that used ethnic slurs, downplayed sexual abuse, and pushed racist and anti-Semitic stereotypes. In March 2018, a “reporter” with American Bridge was arrested on assault charges after pushing a female Interior Department communications official to the floor. American Bridge did not fire the operative, Wilfred Michael Stark, and he was accused of assaulting another female Republican just seven months later. In October 2018, Stark was accused of battery against a female campaign manager in Nevada after “grabbing her arm, and forcefully twisting it behind her back and squeezing.” American Bridge finally got rid of Stark after his second arrest.
https://www.dailycaller.com/2019/05/11/american-bridge-matt-wolking-trump-campaign-tpm/