Irony doesn’t begin to describe the level of hypocrisy and dishonesty going on at Fox & Friends this morning as they continued the Fox News celebration of Andrew McCabe’s firing - yet lectured the rest of the media for being biased. In this case "biased" meant not licking their chops over the cruel and authoritarian treatment of McCabe.
At the beginning of the 8 AM hour, cohost Ed Henry, moonlighting from his day job as a supposedly objective correspondent, announced the news. He didn’t bother to hide the excitement in his voice: “Attorney General Jeff Sessions firing! – Terminating! - the former director at the FBI, Andrew McCabe.”
Cohost Rachel Campos-Duffy got right to the first pro-Trump talking point: that Trump had nothing to do with McCabe’s firing. (She forgot to mention how Fox News has targeted him since October 2016,) She was joined by Henry and cohost Pete Hegseth – who just happens to be a candidate to replace the current Veterans Affairs secretary.
The team then worked in a plug for a second special counsel to investigate the FBI and an attack on the Mueller investigation while they were at it. It was hard to miss how all three were promoting the Trump-friendly message that the whole Russia investigation (which McCabe had been part of) is nothing but a witch hunt from a corrupt deep state.
Of course, they conveniently ignored the evidence of Trump collusion right under our eyes. As well as his long record of suspicious behavior. Not to mention Trump’s penchant for firing and or maligning those who seem to threaten his suspicious relations with Russia: James Comey, Sally Yates, Robert Mueller, Jeff Sessions and now McCabe.
“So the president not responsible for this decision but definitely happy with it,” Campos-Duffy chirped.
“The McCabe/Comey FBI wrote the exoneration statement for Hillary Clinton before they interviewed her," Henry informed us. "That might be all you need to know." Yes, it might be all you need to know - if your only goal is to validate Trump. But anyone interested in the facts would want to know, as The Washington Post reported, that the statement was drafted (i.e. not completed) after investigators had done the bulk of their investigative work and did not expect to file criminal charges in connection with the email server investigation.
I’m sure you won’t be shocked to know that not a single host corrected the record.
Instead, we got former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino enumerating McCabe’s ills. “We’re all supposed to be crying for Andy McCabe? You know, really - spare me!” Bongino cried.
None of the Fox Friends cared that McCabe got fired 26 hours before he planned to retire, which could cost him his pension benefits. And we do not know most of the details of what the grounds were.
But Campos-Duffy agreed with Bongino. She then whined, “The media has joined in also crying a river for Andrew McCabe.”
“Because you’re talking about institutions that the American public have lost confidence in,” Hegseth added, “like the so-called mainstream media ‘journalists’ [he made air quotes] in this country that ram narratives down our throat, that we don’t want and don’t believe.”
Hegseth played a montage of pundits criticizing McCabe’s firing. Henry highlighted a tweet from Andrea Mitchell suggesting that McCabe could qualify for his full pension if a “friendly member of Congress hired him” for the extra time needed.
Campos-Duffy asked Henry, “How unusual is this kind of advocacy for someone to skirt getting his pension when, clearly, the office, the FBI has said this guy doesn’t deserve it?”
Henry feigned even-handedness. “I think if you sat her down, Andrea Mitchell would argue she was just passing along the facts that a supporter of McCabe was saying,” he began. “But, you know, the second part of that is there are plenty of people in the media who you could just see are cheering McCabe on … and suggesting this is the Friday night massacre. This is Nixon. This is Watergate. It is a narrative that whether the facts support it or not, is gonna continue to be fed.”
Yet, one hour later, Geraldo Rivera was on the set complaining that the firing was “tacky” and smacked of Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre.
None of the cohosts complained. That could be because Rivera went on to say he thought McCabe was in “some real, severe criminal jeopardy” for lying to investigators, as Heather at Crooks and Liars noted. I’m sure the cohosts were also heartened by Rivera calling Trump “my friend” and McCabe “a Democratic mole within the FBI from the get-go.”
When Rivera said he thought McCabe would wind up getting his pension anyway, Hegseth called it “unfortunate.”
But no, it’s all the rest of the media that is biased.
Watch the gas lighting below, from the March 17, 2018 Fox & Friends. The second video below is via Crooks and Liars.
BUT… it was clear from the moment he came back this was not the same reasonably professional Ed Henry from before. He is obviously contractually obliged to go along with, even exceed, the usual propaganda claptrap Fox pumps out by the hour.
Same deal with the Greg Jarrett character – after he came back from time-out over his embarrassing alcoholic incidents he was clearly playing a new role as a Hannity-level conspiracy freak.
Fox News was started on the premise that Right Wingers just had to have a cable news feed that attacked President Clinton every minute of the day. Because it wasn’t enough to have Rush Limbaugh and his imitators out there throwing mud across the AM dial. So they went to town with a 24 hour “news” channel. And then this “news” channel pushed to make sure that George W. Bush was perceived as the winner of the 2000 election, even though the numbers in Florida were disputed. (And in fact, the only recount of the state of Florida showed that W actually lost the state…) But the second they had W in the office and Dick Cheney and his cronies actually running the country, they turned on a dime and demanded TOTAL LOYALTY AND OBEDIENCE from everyone while they worked to destroy anything they could from President Clinton’s time in office. After the 2001 terrorist attacks, this “news” channel went even farther – calling anyone who disagreed with the Cheney cronies a traitor. And when the W White House lurched the country into a terrible recession, Fox News bravely insisted that things were much better than everyone else was saying. That is, until President Obama had the temerity to get elected. At which point, Fox News suddenly turned on a dime and declared that the country had gone to Hell, the economy was destroyed and we all needed to blame President Obama for it. For the entirety of his eight years in office, Fox News viciously attacked President Obama – for everything from his birth certificate to his appointments to tracking how many times he played golf. Fox News worked hard for eight years to find some scandal, ANY scandal that they could smear on President Obama. Everything from conspiracy theories to Joe Sestak to Solyndra to Fast & Furious to the IRS to Benghazi to Hillary Clinton’s emails. And they repeatedly got frustrated because these were all debunked as they should have been.
So in 2016, Fox News runs a nonstop smear campaign against Hillary Clinton’s campaign (mildly interrupted by their occasional petty squabbles with Donald Trump), hoping to work the Right Wing strategy of depressing voter turnout as far as possible. And after this backfired in 2012, they found a small success in 2016 – in that they got enough Dems to stay home in the swing states that Trump’s campaign squeaked through. So what do you know, Fox News suddenly turns on a dime again and demands TOTAL LOYALTY AND OBEDIENCE from everyone. So any news channel or anyone in general who points out the truth about the Pence White House and Donald Trump is somehow “biased”. Somehow, as of November 9, 2016, it became unseemly to point out that the elected president is a childish, selfish bigot who repeatedly demonstrates his viciousness, on a daily and even an hourly basis. Somehow, we’re all apparently required to shut up while this group attempts to attack the rest of the country and to bully everyone while they do so.
Fox News spent an entire week salivating over the notion of cheating a career FBI official out of his pension. They cheered this on from the moment they got the leak that it was going to happen. The whole point was to get a story into the mainstream media that McCabe was about to lose his pension so they could torment him with it for a week before it happened. A bit like the Pence White House repeatedly threatening the DACA group before finally making the vicious announcement last September. Because it’s not as much fun to just punch the other kid in the nose when you can spend all day at school telling him and everyone else that you’re going to punch him in the nose. So you get this drumroll all day about how that punch in the nose is coming, and that kid gets to live with all that talk and all that gloating until the bell rings for the end of the school day and pow! One really has to wonder how people like this behave with their children – do they think that this is appropriate behavior for anyone? Or do they just want to get away with as much of this as they can before this bunch gets booted out of office?
As for this little bunch, Ed Henry has no basis to be lecturing anyone about morality or ethics, given the suspension he was reluctantly given by Fox News for his own indiscretions. (I get the feeling Henry is extremely sensitive about having to cover Trump’s infidelity issues – which is a reason why he really shouldn’t be in the position he occupies at Fox News in the first place.) And Bongino has no expertise in any of these areas, and seems to function as an uninformed loudmouth.
I’ll also note that the “second special counsel” notion (which I’m expecting Sessions to cave on and appoint within the next month), isn’t about investigating the FBI or Mueller, regardless of what the Right Wing pundits keep spinning. What they want is for a special counsel to go after Hillary Clinton. If they’re going to have Mueller going after Trump’s people, they want another probe going after the Clintons. This has nothing to do with whether there was anything illegal in Clinton’s behavior and everything to do with cheap, petty revenge. “Lock Her Up” isn’t an empty slogan to these people. They really do mean it.
By the way, Campos-Duffy’s comment about Trump not being responsible for the cheap shot at McCabe is interesting. On the one hand, she wants us to forget that Trump has been railing at McCabe for months in the hope that this exact situation would be the result. So months of tweets and snide remarks about this have nothing to do with the fact that this exact situation has happened – the precise event that Trump get demanding. But Fox News would have you think that he had nothing to do with it. Okay. Then that means, on the other hand, that after this unfortunate bunch of people get tossed out of the White House, Fox News and the Right Wing do not get to play the card that all the bad stuff that happened over the course of this disaster was all the work of Donald Trump. They don’t get to pin the mess on him and walk away clean. They get to own this mess too.
Hegseth’s vicious comment should be understood in the context that he’s talking about not wanting to listen to truthful reporting that interferes with the Right Wing echo chamber mindset. So a Rush Limbaugh fan who regularly tunes in to Tucker and Hannity would totally agree with Hegseth’s opinion. They’d rather just hear that Donald Trump is wonderful and Democrats are evil and let’s throw Hillary Clinton in jail. I imagine that it’s very difficult for that kind of person to listen to actual news reporting. And let’s be honest: Hegseth’s comment really applies to the group that Clinton correctly and appropriately referred to as “a basket of deplorables”.
It’s also interesting to hear Fox News pundits complaining that anyone was discussing anything but gloom and doom for McCabe – they clearly only want to hear that McCabe is desperate and lost, not that he’s actually going to be getting his pension regardless of the Right Wing’s new-found hatred for him.