Chris Wallace may have been issuing a warning to his colleagues when he called it “deeply misleading” for Trump supporters “to pretend” the whistleblower complaint about Trump’s corrupt behavior with Ukraine is a nothing burger. “It isn’t nothing, it’s something,” he said.

Although Wallace made those comments on the supposedly “straight news” America’s Newsroom show, he had to push back against host Sandra Smith.

WALLACE: The spinning that’s been done by the president’s defenders over the last 24 hours since this very damaging whistleblower complaint came out - the spinning is not surprising, but it is astonishing, and I think deeply misleading.

After Wallace went through the allegations of the complaint which will likely lead to Donald Trump’s impeachment, Smith challenged it with a talking point that just happened to match one from the White House. She tried to discredit the complaint by suggesting there was no quid pro quo as alleged.

Wallace replied, “You don’t think that dirt on the vice president’s and his son’s activities would be of value to a president seeking re-election?”

Wallace insisted he’s not arguing for Trump’s impeachment. He seemed to be arguing against knee-jerk defenses of Trump. “But what is clear from reading the complaint is that it is a serious allegation,” he said, and “a lot of it has proven to be borne out already.” 

“To dismiss this as a political hack seems to me to be an effort by the president’s defenders to try to make nothing out of something, and there is something here,” Wallace added. And while we don’t yet know exactly “what’s there,” he called the complaint “credible” and that it should be taken seriously.

“I guess that’s all I’m saying,” Wallace continued, “that for all of the efforts of a lot of people defending the president to pretend this is nothing, it isn’t nothing. It’s something.”

Wallace's comments seemed to fall on deaf ears with Smith. She seemed uninterested in the “something,” as she dove into more spin, this time referencing Trump’s attack on the whistleblower and his or her sources as spies.

Wallace interrupted to push back. “That is very deeply troubling,” he said. He pointed out that the whistleblower had followed the legal process of reporting what people in the government found very disturbing. “They didn’t go to The New York Times, they didn’t go to MSNBC,” Wallace said. To call them spies and suggest they should be executed “strike[s] at the very heart of what whistleblowers are all about,” he said.

The Daily Beast reported, “A source close to Wallace, however, claimed the Fox News anchor was not referring to his colleagues when he referenced the spin coming [from] the president’s defenders.” But we all know he didn’t have to because there is virtually no daylight between Trump operatives inside and outside Fox News.

Watch canary-in-a-coal-mine Wallace below, from the September 27, 2019 America’s Newsroom, via The Daily Beast.