Can We Put the ‘Trump Encourages Anti-Semitism’ Narrative to Bed Now?

The FBI made an arrest Friday in its ongoing investigation into anti-Semitic threats targeting Jewish Community Centers in the U.S.

Agents arrested Juan Thompson, 31, in St. Louis. He is alleged to have made at least eight bomb threats and is accused of cyberstalking of an ex-girlfriend. You won’t believe what he did for a living, though.

Wait for it …

Thompson was a fake-news-spewing anti-Trump activist with communist tendencies.

At the onset of the 2016 presidential race, Thompson was a reporter for The Intercept, a left-of-center “adversarial journalism” online media outlet that focused much of its attention on documents leaked by Edward Snowden. He was fired in February of 2016 for literally making up the stories he was writing for the publication.

As The Intercept’s editor, Betsy Reed, put it:

Thompson fabricated several quotes in his stories and created fake email accounts that he used to impersonate people, one of which was a Gmail account in my name.

An investigation into Thompson’s reporting turned up three instances in which quotes were attributed to people who said they had not been interviewed. In other instances, quotes were attributed to individuals we could not reach, who could not remember speaking with him or whose identities could not be confirmed. In his reporting, Thompson also used quotes that we cannot verify from unnamed people whom he claimed to have encountered at public events. Thompson went to great lengths to deceive his editors, creating an email account to impersonate a source and lying about his reporting methods.

Apparently, he didn’t learn his lesson the first time. In fact, he ramped it up with his anti-Semitic attacks. The FBI’s criminal report states that threats to the JCCs by Thompson were made under both his name and the name of his ex-girlfriend, and that they were made both by email and phone calls.

After dozens of JCCs received bomb threats, which began shortly after President Donald Trump’s election, liberal groups and the compliant mainstream media attempted to paint his victory as the cause. And, when the president suggested these attacks could have been caused to make someone look bad, he was ridiculed.

“Sometimes it’s the reverse, to make people—or to make others—look bad,” he said. The comment, despite his condemnation of anti-Semitism during his speech to Congress this week, was slammed by liberals.

But now it seems, once again, he was right. {eoa}