CNN’s MAGA mouthpiece, Scott Jennings, appeared to hang President Trump and his top brass out to dry over the administration’s inflammatory rhetoric about a man killed by federal agents in Minnesota.
Border Patrol agents shot and killed 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on Saturday, triggering a public uproar that only intensified as Trump officials embarked on a desperate bid for damage control. The Department of Homeland Security used the fact that Pretti was in possession of a gun—which he did not draw and was legally permitted to carry—to claim he “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller trumpeted this rhetoric and then took it a step further, calling Pretti an “assassin” who had sought “to murder federal agents.” In a press conference two days later, after footage circulated showing Pretti had been disarmed before he was shot, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt refused to say if Miller intended to apologize for smearing a dead man.
This question was posed to Scott Jennings on The Source with Kaitlan Collins on Monday. Instead of his usual firebrand response, Jennings chose not to go to bat for Trump, Miller or Leavitt. “Look, that‘s a question for the president and for Karoline Leavitt,” he demurred.
Leavitt, in her non-answer about whether Miller would apologize to Pretti’s family, took on a softer tone than officials had initially used, saying: “This incident remains under investigation and nobody here at the White House… wants to see Americans hurt or killed.”
“I think she had it just right,” Jennings offered in response, before reverting to type and attempting to blame state leadership in Minnesota. “The president and nobody else in the White House wants to see people getting injured. Also, the president and nobody else in the White House wants to see Democrats in Minnesota radicalizing people and instructing them to go obstruct federal law enforcement. That‘s the thing here. There‘s a difference between protesting and trying to impede and obstruct law enforcement.”
He said protesting creates “a recipe for chaos,” and a “recipe for heartbreak and tragedy.”
Jennings added, “And we have now seen it twice in Minnesota. They need to stay on message here with what the president is trying to do. He‘s simply trying to enforce federal immigration law just like every other president before him has done.”
Miller had ignited backlash by declaring just three and a half hours after Pretti’s killing: “A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat account sides with the terrorists.”
His post cited comments from a Democratic Party account that called for ICE to withdraw from Minneapolis. Miller then doubled down in smearing Pretti in response to a Democratic lawmaker’s call to withhold funding for ICE, complaining that “an assassin tried to murder federal agents and this is your response.”
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