Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them

by Andrew Egger

You can drive yourself crazy, listening to these admin people lie and spin. Every day they shamelessly open new vistas into kaleidoscopic alternate realities; staying moored here in the real world, among the things that have actually happened, is harder after a while than you’d think.

So it’s nice when we get palate-cleansing days like yesterday—when the lies are so obvious, so transparent and crude on their face, that it’s effortless to conclude: Yeah, these folks are just utterly full of shit.

Yesterday morning, JD Vance described Kilmar Abrego Garcia—the migrant wrongly deported to a Salvadorean supermax prison this month—as “a convicted MS-13 gang member.” This was flatly false; Abrego Garcia has never been charged with, let alone convicted of, a crime.

But asked about it at her press briefing later, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt doubled down.

“The vice president said he was a convicted member of MS-13,” a reporter asked her. “What evidence is there to back that up?”

“There’s a lot of evidence,” Leavitt replied. “And the Department of Homeland Security and ICE have that evidence, and I saw it this morning.”

Again: That this is a lie is a matter of public record. DHS and ICE are not sitting on secret records showing Abrego Garcia is a convict. If they were, they would release them. Instead, the public record is what his lawyers wrote in a filing this week, an assertion the government did not dispute in its response: “Abrego Garcia has never been arrested or charged with any crime in the U.S. or El Salvador.”

A few minutes later, a reporter asked Leavitt: “You said you’d seen evidence that this man was a convicted gang member. In what court was he convicted, and for what?”

“This individual was an MS-13 ringleader,” Leavitt said. “He is a leader in the brutal MS-13 gang, and he is involved in human trafficking, and now MS-13 is a designated foreign terrorist organization.” She threw in some stuff about “the insane failing Atlantic magazine” for flavor.

The administration has been rolling out this “human trafficking” line a lot since the Abrego Garcia story broke. DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin repeatedly posted yesterday that “we have intelligence reports that he is involved in human trafficking.”

Unlike “convicted,” this could in theory be true.¹

But the government has been in court talking about Abrego Garcia a lot this week, and in that forum—where, unlike on social media and from the White House podium, you’re actually legally obliged to tell the truth—they haven’t alleged anything of the sort. And DHS has released no evidence whatsoever in support of that claim. I asked McLaughlin yesterday whether the agency had any plans to release that supposed evidence. She responded with a word-for-word repeat of her original tweet: “The individual in question is a member of the brutal MS-13 gang—we have intelligence reports that he is involved in human trafficking.”

This is becoming a pattern. Besides Abrego Garcia, the most controversial of the deportees to El Salvador has been Andry Hernandez, the gay makeup artist who was seemingly deported due to his “Mom” and “Dad” tattoos, which DHS flagged as linked to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Not so, said McLaughlin: “This man’s own social media indicates he is a member of Tren de Aragua.” But DHS hasn’t released any evidence to back that up, and when I emailed McLaughlin this week to ask to see that evidence, the department declined to comment.

I am not Facebook buds with Andry Hernandez. I have not peeped his Insta. His socials, for all I know, could be chockablock with the bloodthirstiest gang content imaginable. But the only data point we have saying there’s any there there is the good word of press flacks in an administration that will also claim straightfacedly that a guy who’s never been arrested has, in fact, been convicted of crimes. It ain’t worth much without the evidence. They’ve given us zilch.

There was a time when conservatives weren’t bending over backwards to trust the government when it spun them unsupported whoppers. Of course, there was a time when they weren’t cheering on the annihilation of due process, too. What a time to be alive!