As legitimate news outlets scrambled to read and digest the newly-released Mueller report, Fox News hosted Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani for 24 minutes of unimpeded ranting and unchallenged conspiracy theories against the investigation.
It was bad enough that Attorney General William Barr held a prebuttal press conference before the release of the report. Even Fox’s own Chris Wallace described Barr as acting more like a “counselor for the defense and the counselor for the president rather than the attorney general.”
You know that if the Mueller report really fully exonerated Trump, Barr would have said so directly or just released the report rather than making a sycophantic prebuttal.
So before the totality of the evidence could be weighed and analyzed in the hundreds of just-released pages, Fox trotted out Giuliani for more spin. Not surprisingly, Giuliani called the report “a clear victory” even though he claimed Mueller used “a standard of proof that’s unheard of” because he said he “can’t be conclusively sure that the president didn’t commit obstruction.”
“That means the president has to prove his innocence which kind of upends 2,000 years of jurisprudence,” Giuliani continued, further signaling there was plenty of damning material in the report. Not surprisingly, it turns out there was. But Fox was more interested in getting Giuliani’s spin than in any quick independent review of the report.
“These people had a bias, a strong one,” Giuliani complained.
As previously noted, Giuliani also revealed in this interview that he had gotten the Mueller report two days ago. Yet, despite its many findings of wrongdoing by Trump, Giuliani repeatedly painted the Mueller team as the criminals.
Not one of the Fox News hosts participating in this chat thought to ask why, if the report was such a complete exoneration of Trump, Giuliani was continuing to rant about the bias of the investigators. Wouldn’t such a sweeping exoneration indicate otherwise?
Among other things, Giuliani accused Mueller of “trying to trap [Trump] into perjury” and laying a “perjury trap” for Michael Flynn. “These people acted in bad faith numerous times. What they did to Manafort should be investigated,” Giuliani accused. There was no pushback from any of the hosts.
“This has been the third investigation of collusion, two by the Justice Department. Both conclude nothing,” Giuliani announced. Yet the Mueller report contains plenty evidence of collusion. Again, no pushback from Fox.
“You want Russian collusion?" Giuliani continued. "Go look at the article in the Ukrainian papers a week and a half ago about how they’ve opened an investigation of their own officials for colluding with Hillary Clinton.”
No challenge there, either. I'm surprised everyone didn't break into a chorus of "Lock her up."
At about 11:30, Giuliani ranted that the Mueller team “created the crime” against Flynn (of perjury). “Somebody’s got to do something about that and rein them in. One of these guys is a terror!” Giuliani started to go on, but stopped himself.
Host Bill Hemmer prodded for more. He asked, “What were you saying?”
“One of these guys is a terror,” Giuliani repeated, without saying who he was referring to. “He shouldn’t be allowed to prosecute.” Giuliani claimed “he did it in Arthur Andersen, he did it in Merrill Lynch, created crimes in both, he’s been cited by the Justice Department twice for not turning over exculpatory material and I know, from the witnesses, he treated them horribly, horribly.”
Instead of asking for details of what Giuliani was referring to, host Sandra Smith changed the subject.
I’ll have more on Giuliani’s later conspiracy theory in my next post.
Meanwhile, watch the three hosts treat Giuliani as some kind of oracle below, from the April 18, 2019 America’s Newsroom.