The Washington Post said it will not publish former President Trump’s response to a new investigative series it published this week about the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol because the statement contained irrelevant and unfounded claims about the attack and election integrity.
“The Post investigation was based on interviews with 230 people and thousands of pages of court documents and internal law enforcement reports, along with hundreds of videos, photographs and audio recordings,” the newspaper said in an introduction to the three-part series published on Monday. “The Post provided Trump a list of 37 findings reported as part of its investigation.”
A Trump spokesman, Taylor Budowich, provided the outlet a statement. The Post said the statement was “a lengthy written response that included series of unrelated, inflammatory claims that The Post is not publishing in full.”
The Post noted that Budowich said the former president “greatly objected” to all of the newspaper’s findings, dismissing it as “fake news” and describing people who carried out violence at the Capitol that day as “agitators not associated with President Trump.”
“The media’s obsession with the January 6th protest is a blatant attempt to overshadow a simple fact: there is no greater threat to America than leftist journalists and the Fake News, which has avoided a careful examination of the fraudulent 2020 election,” a portion of the statement from Budowich that the Post did publish reads. “The media, just like the Democrats, do not want to see secure and honest elections. Instead of reporting the facts, outlets like the Washington Post sow division, hate, and lies, like it is doing with this story.”
“As for the media clerics, their attempts to censor Mr. Trump have done nothing to diminish his popularity,” the Journal wrote in its defense. “Our advice would be to examine their own standards after they fell so easily for false Russian collusion claims. They’d have more credibility in refuting Mr. Trump’s.”