One thing about Putin’s forty-five-minute press briefing will tell you something about the current resident of the Oval Office. Putin did not use cue cards, He did not pick the questions in advance, and in that 45 minutes, he answered more questions from the press than Joe Biden has in six months. And he answered every question.
He was asked some pretty tough questions but his voice never broke and he did not forget what he was talking about and he never worried that his aides wouldn’t angry if he did answer questions. That is quite a difference from Biden.
One reporter asked Putin:
“If all of your political opponents are dead, in prison, poisoned, doesn’t that send a message that you do not want a fair political fight?”
Putin replied:
“On the question of who is murdering whom, people rioted and went into the Congress in the U.S. with political demands and many people were declared as criminals and they are threatened with imprisonment from 20 to 25 years.”
“These people were immediately arrested after those events, on what grounds we don’t know always. The states didn’t inform us about that. One of the participants was just shot on the spot and unarmed as well. Many countries are going through exactly what we’re going through. Let me just repeat, we sympathize with what was happening in the states but we do not wish that to happen in Russia.”
Wow. An ABC reporter is called upon for a question, tells Putin, "the list of your political opponents who are dead, imprisoned, or jailed is long," and asks, "what are you so afraid of?" Putin doesn't exactly reject the premise of her question. pic.twitter.com/xaILsr9CMZ
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 16, 2021
Putin also brought up the BLM riots:
“America just recently had very severe events, well-known events, after the killing of an African American. And the entire movement developed known as Black Lives Matter. I’m not going to comment on that but here’s what I do want to say. What we saw was disorder, destruction, violations of the law, etc..”
“We feel sympathy for the United States of America but we don’t want that to happen on our territory. We’re doing our utmost to not allow it to happen.”
Putin is right but he could have been more right. He could have mentioned the 1,500 businesses that were looted and burned in Minneapolis alone. He didn’t mention that at the BLM and antifa riots over 700 police officers were injured or the number of deaths from those riots or the fact that only a small percentage actually got charged with crimes that DAs did not drop.
