Brookfield leader: Tweets were about spy balloon, not Biden
BROOKFIELD — Republican First Selectwoman Tara Carr on Tuesday defended her tweets mentioning gunfire and President Joe Biden, saying she was calling on the president to shoot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon.
In a statement, Carr said she was “shocked and critical of President Biden’s failure to act while a Chinese Communist Party balloon sailed over the USA,” and her reply to another user’s tweet about it was taken out of context.
Carr’s two-week-old tweets were condemned by local Democrats over the weekend as “disgraceful,” and as of Monday, her Twitter account was suspended for violating the social network’s rules.
“Unfortunately, some on the fringe of the political spectrum, who are more interested in engaging in vitriolic statements and fabricating their own truths rather than intelligent discourse, took these comments out of context and made ridiculous and false assertions that somehow, I was promoting violence against our nation’s President,” she said in a statement Tuesday morning. “This is a complete lie.”
Carr, a retired U.S. Army officer, said she was urging prompt action to take down the balloon with “one shot, one kill” because she “understood that this was a direct invasion of our nation by a foreign power.” She declined to comment further Tuesday to Hearst Connecticut Media.
On Feb. 4, Carr responded to a tweet from an RNC Research account that shared a Fox News photo of Biden about the suspected spy balloon that federal authorities believe came from China. Her response to the original tweet stated, “He’s aiding & abetting the enemy. Ready. Aim. Fire. One shot, one kill. That simple…”
She tweeted the same message in response to a video the RNC Research account shared of Vice President Kamala Harris saying “we have a lot to be thankful for in” Biden, according to a screenshot shared by Brookfield’s Democratic Town Committee. The tweets were removed from Carr’s Twitter feed as of Sunday.
In two other tweets, she wrote a similar message in response to other Twitter threads about the spy balloon, according to screenshots shared by Connecticut Daily Runctions columnist Kevin Rennie.
Spokespeople for the Secret Service did not return a request for comment about whether the agency is investigating the tweets.
Brookfield Democratic Town Committee Chair Aaron Zimmer on Sunday said he didn’t know what Carr meant by the tweets, but called them “disgraceful” and “unbecoming” for “the top official in our town.”
In her statement, Carr said people are twisting her words “to foment hatred and discord against their political opponents during an election year.”
“My focus is on the business of Brookfield, that is far more important than engaging with small-minded individuals who would prefer to see us fail, simply to try and win an election,” she said in her statement.
Brookfield Republican Town Committee Chair George Blass defended Carr on Monday, saying the controversy over her tweet “blown out of proportion.”
Blass said she was suggesting how the U.S. should deal with the balloon, which was eventually shot down the next day after drifting over the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of South Carolina, and her comment was “taken out of context.”