Don’t fuck with National Public Radio! In between Cellar Notes and Planet Money, they will shank a bitch who calls them liars, at least in their Ned Flanders-ish sort of way. Now they’re naming names of the staffers involved in what they call “the dustup,” following “the campaign’s conflicting responses.”
By “conflicting responses,” they mean former President Bonespurs has been blarbling out new lies about what went on at that Arlington National Cemetery incident on August 26. You know, that time the Trump campaign trampled on dead soldiers’ graves in a restricted area to film a campaign ad that they posted to TikTok, took some ghoulish, grinning thumbs-up photos, and allegedly shoved a female cemetery worker who tried to stop them.
Previously!
The story doesn’t seem to be going away, and now Treasontits McGee has a new spin on it: The incident never happened at all!
Trump went on Sean Hannity’s radio show to groan, “If you look at just the records, there was no conflict, there was no fight, there was no anything,” and “Do you notice that the person represented now doesn’t want to talk, he [sic] doesn’t want to speak or talk? The nice thing, the beautiful thing, was all the parents and relatives got together and they said ‘That’s a false story, it was totally false.’” Then he hammed out a rant on his failing website.
“There was no conflict or ‘fighting’ at Arlington National Cemetery last week. It was a made up story by Comrade Kamala and her misinformation squad.”
This, of course, directly conflicts the statement from his sweaty spokes-ham Steven Cheung: “The fact is that a private photographer was permitted on the premises and for whatever reason an unnamed individual, clearly suffering from a mental health episode, decided to physically block members of President Trump’s team during a very solemn ceremony.” Cheung also said that they were “prepared to release footage” of the whole thing, but guess a dog ate it?
So now NPR is dropping names of these shovers, and they are Justin Caporale and Michel Picard. Surprising! Our money had been on Corey Lewandowski, seeing as how he’s been publicly accused of assaulting three women already. Seems like it’s kind of his thing.
So who are these guys? Michel Picard is described as a member of Trump’s “advance team,” though strangely there seems to be no other information out there about him at all, or verified photos. He’s identified in an article as helping shield the crowd while Trump was shot at in Butler, PA. There is a professional troll by that name (but spelled with an “a”), which sounds like a guy Trump would hire, but no one resembling him appears in any Arlington crowd shots. There’s also a Canadian politician and a French literary critic by that name. But this Picard seems to not officially exist anywhere at all, except for on Trump’s payroll. Hopefully someone will find him, so we can know what he looks like.
But we do know a lot about Justin Caporale! He’s been on the Trump team since the 2016 election, and was a top aide to Melania, though in 2018 he was reportedly fired by John Kelly due to “an undisclosed issue with his background check.” That was no problem for Ron DeSantis, though, who as Florida governor hired him and paid him $120,000 a year to be his director of external affairs.
Caporale returned to work for Trump in 2020 as a contractor through his company, Event Strategies, which made more than $1.7 million planning events for the 2020 campaign. He was THE project manager for the January 6 “Stop The Steal” rally, the one Trump lied about having nothing to do with. Caporale was deposed by the House January 6 Select Committee in March of 2022, where he described being in communication with White House staff, who were not supposed to be using their official White House methods of communication to coordinate political events at all in the first place. Throw it on the criming pile! Caporale was the one who described epic backstage battling between factions to keep nut jobs like Mike Lindell, Ali Alexander, Alex Jones, and Roger Stone from “embarrassing the president,” ha ha!
Caporale had this exchange with the Committee back then:
Q: Now, what’s your view of the folks who attacked the Capitol?
CAPORALE: I mean, my view is the same as what I said a moment ago, you know. Having respect for our institutions and, you know, obviously our monuments … I thought it was a disgusting display that should’ve never happened, you know.
But hey, those guys who put on disgusting disrespectful displays at our monuments write big checks, so what are you gonna do?
Sure would be great if somebody released that video, or the report that was taken at the time! Or even pressed some charges! But oh well, shove it on the big old Trump “no consequences pile,” I guess.
[NPR/ Tampa Bay Times/ Open Secrets/ January 6 Committee Transcript]
