Prior to this weekend’s Washington Post hit piece on the 13 Gold Star families, whose loved ones were killed during Joe Biden’s disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, and their primary organizer, Marlon Bateman, Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) told the Washington Reporter that its premise is off base. Bateman, he said, is “a hero.”

Post reporters Dan Lamothe and Isaac Arnsworth wrote an article over the weekend which attacked Bateman, and argued that Donald Trump’s recent visit to Arlington National Cemetery, during which he participated in a wreath-laying ceremony for the 13 slain servicemembers, was a “publicity stunt.” Multiple Gold Star family members — who invited Trump to the event — have already refuted such claims. 

“First the media ignored the Gold Star families. Now the media are targeting them,” Issa said.

“I have been part of this group since its inception and I have been on at least 95 percent or more of the calls between the group members and I have never heard Marlon say that or anything remotely like that,” Mark Schmitz, the father of Lance Cpl. Jared Schmitz wrote to the Post, according to screenshots obtained by The Post Millennial. “I guess integrity is actually dead at the Washington Post.”

In the three years since Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal, the Gold Star families have received scant coverage from mainstream outlets, unless they can be used to attack Trump, multiple sources told the Reporter. “Jen Psaki told the media to forget the Gold Star families existed,” one individual said. “So they did. Now the White House and the Harris campaign are telling them to attack the families. So they are.”

The Reporter was on-site for Trump’s Arlington visit that is at the center of the piece that Post Lamothe and Arnsworth were not at. The Post’s office is 2.8 miles away from Arlington National Cemetery. Prior to this week’s potential story, Arnsworth had never reached out to any of the Gold Star families to cover them or their families, a source close to the families noted — and not one Post reporter has reached out to the congressional office that collaborates most closely with the families. 

“No Washington Post reporter contacted us for a story when we first brought the Gold Star families to Washington or held their first-ever public forum in our California district,” Issa’s communications director, Jonathan Wilcox, told the Reporter. “The same goes for MSNBC, PBS, NPR, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, the New Yorker … none reached out for a meaningful feature. Never, not once. Not a call, not a text, nothing.”

Issa has been the leading advocate for the 13 families. Last summer, he hosted several of the families at a town hall in his district, where they spoke together publicly about their loved ones to a nationally-televised audience for the first time as a group. No one from the Post was there. 

Issa’s staff suggested to the Reporter that Issa’s long and widely-publicized involvement with these families may have been unknown to this pair of journalists. “Not for nothing, they had no idea we were even involved,” one noted.

President Joe Biden has not spoken with any of the families since he checked his watch during the dignified transfer of their loved ones three years ago. Vice President Kamala Harris has never spoken to the families. Neither politician has publicly said the names of the 13 servicemembers.