This morning, Mike Huckabee fired what is surely only one of many salvos in a Fox News war on Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller, saying, “There needs to be an investigation of the investigation.” Later, Sean Hannity hinted he’s got something cooking for tomorrow night.
Now that former national security adviser Michael Flynn seems to be singing like a canary to Mueller, you can count on Fox News not to care about what Flynn might be revealing about higher ups in the Trump administration. Even worse, Fox will almost certainly not care about any Russian interference in our 2016 election.
But you can count on a smear campaign against Mueller.
Sean Hannity has long been on a Destroy Mueller Mission. I theorized back in October that Hannity’s fixation on Hillary Clinton’s Uranium One “scandal” was really about discrediting the Russia investigation and Mueller. Media Matters crunched some numbers in late November and found that Hannity used his Fox show to call for Mueller to resign or recuse himself, or to be fired, 40 times. In addition, there were 220 statements by him or guests suggesting Mueller had a “conflict of interest.” Often, the attacks coincided with damaging news about Trump (elsewhere, of course).
Today, Hannity tweeted a suggestion that he's got more to come tomorrow:
To all my deplorable friends. Tick tock. Tomorrow!!
— Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) December 4, 2017
Meanwhile, today's Fox & Friends, Trump’s favorite morning show, called on Mike Huckabee, father of Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, to “comment” on (read: attack and propagandize) the latest developments in the Russia investigation.
First, Huckabee attacked ABC News’ Brian Ross, who erroneously reported that Flynn had been directed by candidate Donald Trump to contact the Russians. “I think Brian Ross has been unmasked as a person who has his own agenda,” Huckabee said. As Heather at Crooks and Liars noted, this was little more than “a big heaping helping of projection” given “what we see every single day from his network.”
Then, after a prompt from cohost Rachel Campos-Duffy, Huckabee started in on Mueller. For added deflection, cohost Pete Hegseth suggested that Mueller’s “conflict of interest” means there should be another Hillary Clinton investigation. (Transcript below via Crooks and Liars, with minor edits).
CAMPOS-DUFFY: Well governor, it looks like Hillary's e-mail investigation is now under a new review because we've now learned that the FBI agent who was investigating was a Hillary supporter and a Trump hater.
HUCKABEE: Well, kind of fits in. You've got Bob Mueller was a close pal of Comey, they're BFFs and then in addition to that, you have a whole bunch of the investigators who are Hillary Clinton donors and supporters. You know, this whole investigation quite frankly stinks worse than cabbage cooking in a small unventilated kitchen with sardines on the side.
HEGSETH: How much does it taint previous efforts, I mean, Hillary Clinton's investigation into her e-mails, you look at the investigation that started in 2016 based on the fake Russian dossier. I mean, this Peter Strzok, the one who's been moved off of the investigation, he's involved in all of that, so is it time to look back at some of that too?
HUCKABEE: Well, there needs to be an investigation of the investigation, in part because was in fact this whole thing based on a phony dossier that was financed by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC? If that’s the case, if something that was totally manufactured, was then presented to federal investigators, to the FBI and said, “You need to investigate Donald Trump and his campaign,” and they used that as a way to go after and electronically surveil members of the campaign, including the president, candidate Donald Trump and/or his staff, and that’s how they got all this stuff? That’s entrapment. My Gosh! It just is the kind of thing that an American citizen, even if you hate Donald Trump, you should be very worried that your government can use all of its unlimited resources when they want to go after you, to do something to destroy your life. That’s frightening.
Fasten your seatbelts, there's a bumpy ride ahead. Even if Mueller discovers Trump overtly told Vladimir Putin he’d be welcome to interfere in the election, Fox News will almost surely stand by its man, Trump.
Watch Huckabee and the Trump Friends prove they are more loyal to Trump than the U.S. below, from the December 3, 2017 Fox & Friends, via Crooks and Liars.