Leave it to weekday afternoon CNN Newsroom host Brooke Baldwin to carry water for Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN), complaining on Thursday that Omar was “forced to defend her patriotism again” after Omar downplayed the Islamic terror attacks on September 11, 2001 as merely “some people did something.”

And, not surprisingly, Baldwin framed it as a Fox News-fueled controversy, showing no daylight between herself and unabashedly liberal pundits denouncing The New York Post’s Thursday cover with a picture of the second hijacked plane hitting the South Tower of the World Trade Center that fateful Tuesday morning at 9:03 a.m. Eastern.

In the first of two teases for the Omar segment, Baldwin fretted: “Plus freshman Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar forced to defend her patriotism again. This time, it’s comments she made about 9/11.”

Baldwin asserted in the other tease that Omar was “once again at the center of controversy” thanks to “Fox News and her comments about September 11th.” Sorry, Brooke, but boiling it down to a Fox News controversy is pretty weak.

At 2:32 p.m. Eastern, Baldwin teed up the Omar comments in question by describing the situation as her “doing battle with Fox and Friends over how she described 9/11.”

Here’s what Omar told a banquet hosted by the Council on America-Islamic Relations (CAIR): “CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.” And as a side note, the Hamas-loving group wasn’t founded after 9/11, so Omar didn’t have her facts in order.

Here’s how Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade responsed to Omar on Wednesday’s show:

Some people did something. Like an unprovoked attack, killing people in the Pentagon — thousands in the Pentagon — the Flight 93 as well as in the world trade center. Really? There — “some people did something?” You have to wonder if she's an American First.

After Baldwin played a clip of Omar responded to Kilmeade during a friendly interview with CBS’s Stephen Colbert, Baldwin read a Kilmeade tweet seeking to clarify himself but standing by his calling out of Omar because she was “downgrad[ing] the 9/11 attacks.”

Baldwin then brought on CNN Politics reporter (and former Weekly Standard writer) Michael Warren, who wrote a CNN.com piece with this excerpt framing GOP criticism of Omar as inherently political: “Omar has displaced Nancy Pelosi as the Republicans’ favorite liberal boogeyman, a new face the [Republican Party] could weaponize in an attempt to depict the Democratic party as extreme and out-of-touch.”

Here’s part of what Warren then told Baldwin (click “expand”)

[W]e saw last week, Brooke, a conservative outside group, not officially lined with the Republicans, but closely aligned with the Republican establishment launch a series of ads going after Representative Omar for those comments that she made earlier this year....and then this week the campaign arm of the House Republicans, the National Congressional — Republican Congressional Committee, link her and Rashida Tlaib, the other freshman Muslim woman in Congress, with a new congressional candidate in Michigan saying that they inspired this socialist candidate. And then you saw a blast from the RNC which seemed to have prompted Brian Kilmeade's comments on Fox & Friends linking those comments that Omar made in front of CAIR — to — and suggesting that she was down playing and those are the words the RNC used, downplaying the terrorist attacks. So, you could kind of see at many different levels, Republicans seem to see Omar as a new way of really tagging her with the entire Democratic Party with an eye toward 2020 and those elections then.

Baldwin only then conceded that Omar has placed “Democrats in a pretty tough position” and Warren agreed that “[t]here are some actual substantive attacks that Republicans are making,” citing Omar’s comment about supporters of Israel in Congress may have dual loyalties.

But when it comes to her bizarre characterization of 9/11, Warren wondered:

Democrats have this sort of tough decision they have to make. Do they keep her at arm's length because of the sort of strident way that she approaches these things, calling White House aide Stephen Miller a white nationalist or do they sort of circle the wagons. One of their own members is under attack by Republicans and, in some ways, in really unfair ways that’s something that I think Democrats don't want to be having this discussion. They want to be focused on health care. They want to be focused on the economy, but — but Congresswoman Omar has sort of put them in this position.

To see the relevant transcript from April 11's CNN Newsroom with Brooke Baldwin, click “expand.”