Washington Post runs ‘fact-check’ on Tim Scott’s ancestry but not on Kamala Harris’ ‘Fweedom’ plagiarism claim

The Washington Post appears quite selective when it comes to the urgency of its “fact-checks” of certain prominent politicians.

Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., was the subject of a lengthy piece on Friday by the Post’s star fact-checker, Glenn Kessler.

The piece, “Tim Scott often talks about his grandfather and cotton. There’s more to that tale,” examined the “origin stories” of comments the Senator has made over the years about being an ancestor of slaves. Scott has said his grandfather dropped out of elementary school to pick cotton, so the liberal newspaper enlisted its fact-checker to get to the bottom of the claim.

“The tale of his grandfather fits in with a narrative of Scott moving up from humble circumstances to reach a position of political power in the U.S. Senate,” Kessler wrote. “But Scott separately has acknowledged that his great-great-grandfather, Lawrence Ware, once owned 900 acres in South Carolina.”

Kessler declared he “dug into the South Carolina census records” to “close this gap in Scott’s narrative” despite admitting “census data is historically questionable at best — and at times unreliable.”

“Our research reveals a more complex story than what Scott tells audiences. Scott’s grandfather’s father was also a substantial landowner — and Scott’s grandfather, Artis Ware, worked on that farm,” Kessler wrote. “Scott’s family history in South Carolina offers a fascinating window into a little-known aspect of history in the racist South following the Civil War and in the immediate aftermath of slavery — that some enterprising Black families purchased property as a way to avoid sharecropping and achieve a measure of independence from White-dominated society.”

Kessler then dove into a longwinded tale of Scott’s ancestors using data he already admitted was often unreliable.

The fact-checker ultimately concluded to not give the lawmaker any Pinocchios, writing, “Scott’s ‘cotton to Congress’ line is missing some nuance, but we are not going to rate his statements.”

However, the Washington Post has yet to look into the “tale” from Vice President Harris, which has been accused of plagiarism earlier this year.

Harris has repeatedly boasted of her parents’ involvement in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. In an Elle magazine interview that was published in October, she recalled accompanying them to marches as a toddler in a stroller.

“Senator Kamala Harris started her life’s work young,” writer Ashley C. Ford led off the piece. “She laughs from her gut, the way you would with family, as she remembers being wheeled through an Oakland, California, civil rights march in a stroller with no straps with her parents and her uncle. At some point, she fell from the stroller … and the adults, caught up in the rapture of protest, just kept on marching. By the time they noticed little Kamala was gone and doubled back, she was understandably upset.”

“My mother tells the story about how I’m fussing,” Harris told the magazine. “And she’s like, ‘Baby, what do you want? What do you need?’ And I just looked at her and I said, ‘Fweedom.’”

This was a story Harris has told over and over again from her June 2020 appearance on “The Tonight Show” to her 2019 book tour. It was documented as early as 2004 in an interview with W Magazine.

Tom Elliott on X (formerly Twitter): “In June, @KamalaHarris tells Jimmy Fallon an apparently plagiarized story about demanding “freedom” while in a stroller at a civil rights march pic.twitter.com/bw7N1qXiz5 / X”

In June, @KamalaHarris tells Jimmy Fallon an apparently plagiarized story about demanding “freedom” while in a stroller at a civil rights march pic.twitter.com/bw7N1qXiz5