Fox host Laura Ingraham turned her back on the very damning evidence against Mike Pence in the Ukraine scandal by falsely claiming Democrats are planning to make Nancy Pelosi president.
On Saturday's AM Joy, former Republican Congressman David Jolly laid out a devastating argument for impeaching Mike Pence along with Donald Trump. Calling Pence “the Ivanka Trump of the vice presidency,” Jolly noted that Pence was smack in the middle of the crucial events surrounding Trump’s attempt to extort the president of Ukraine:
JOLLY: Consider the facts, consider what we know already publicly available. The vice president cancelled his trip to the [Ukrainian president's] inauguration in May to attend a political rally for Donald Trump. There was not a significant obligation he had to attend to. We know the infamous phone call at the end of July with Trump. The text messages all occurred between the end of July and throughout August, preceding the president sending Vice President Pence to meet with Zelensky on September 1 where he told the vice president, we're not giving you the aid. We're not giving you the assistance. All this was occurring at the same time.
So to suggest that a vice president did not know about a quid pro quo or that the leverage was being used to get an investigation into Biden would suggest that the president knew, the secretary of state knew, the attorney general knew, 12 people on the phone call knew, the ambassador to the EU, the acting ambassador to the Ukraine, the special envoy to the Ukraine, at least one whistle-blower, maybe a second, but Vice President Mike Pence didn't know anything about this? It's not believable.
No, it’s not believable… unless you’re a Fox News opinion host willing to do or say just about anything to make the Lying Grifter in Chief look good. In that case, you pretend to see nothing untoward in Trump World and everything wrong with anyone who does.
Fox News host Laura Ingraham did that job well last night. She was assisted by former Clinton/Whitewater investigator Robert Ray in her sleight of hand.
Ignoring the fact that Donald Trump is the one who committed the extortion, Ingraham spoke accusingly of Democrats Nancy Pelosi and John Podesta having relatives with a “shady history” of doing business business in Ukraine.
That, of course, has nothing to do with Trump blocking Congressionally approved, taxpayer funds to Ukraine while asking for "a favor" in order to advance his own political interests. But Ingraham and Ray conveniently ignored that as they pretended (because neither could really be so stupid as to actually believe) that Trump – suddenly cares about corruption.
National security experts were reportedly shocked and flummoxed by Attorney General William Barr’s international escapades to discredit the Russia investigation (part of Trump's Ukraine "favor"). But Ray claimed that Barr’s efforts are “what the ordinary processes of the Department of Justice are about.”
“This is what people elected [Trump] to contend with and the swamp, obviously, is fighting back,” Ray said.
“And you know, ultimately I think, as the former acting Attorney General was suggesting, is the American people see right through this,” Ray claimed.
Rather than point out that support for impeachment is rising, Ingraham quickly changed the subject. She played a clip of former Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks suggesting ways to prosecute Pence:
WINE-BANKS: You could impeach Pence first. The problem is that Donald Trump then has to name his replacement but I think that maybe a deal could be struck where he was told, if you don't make a replacement, then Nancy Pelosi does become president.
I suspect that Ingraham got this clip from a Washington Examiner article titled, “MSNBC guest outlines plan to impeach Trump and make Nancy Pelosi president.” But in reality, as the full discussion clearly demonstrates, Wine-Banks was talking about how to deal with Pence’s wrongdoing without making Nancy Pelosi president. Wine-Banks (also part of Saturday's AM Joy) was responding to Jolly’s earlier interview and recognizing that Republicans would never agree to Trump's removal from office unless a Republican replaced him.
After the clip, Ingraham sneered, “OK, Robert, you've heard of fantasy football. This is fantasy impeachment.”
Ray replied, “I'd like to laugh except for the fact that it's so serious that this is completely irresponsible and as I've - you have suggested previously, this has got to stop.”
Speaking of laughable, Ingraham added, “Yes, well again, this is the way they do business now. We don't do the people's business. We do the smear machine’s business.”
Yes, the same Ingraham who had just smeared Democrats with a falsehood, who has previously smeared Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg, Greta Thunberg, LeBron James and Kevin Durant, who disrespected fallen servicemen in Normandy in order to mock Democratic presidential candidates, and who smeared America as a whole, saying, “the America that we know and love doesn’t exist anymore” because of “massive demographic changes” - that Laura Ingraham thinks we should believe she cares about doing the people's business.
Watch the dishonest deflection below, from the October 7, 2019 The Ingraham Angle.