Tucker Carlson’s 12-minute monologue attacking the FBI and obfuscating Donald Trump’s very suspicious behavior toward Russia and Vladimir Putin was not just filled with falsehoods but it indicated that Carlson is willing to subvert our system of justice for the sake of covering up Trump’s misdeeds.
Carlson was responding to the bombshell New York Times report that the FBI had opened a counterintelligence investigation into whether Donald Trump was secretly working on behalf of Russia. Although Carlson brags that his show is the “sworn enemy of lying, pomposity, smugness, and groupthink,” he proved willing to engage in most of those behaviors in service of shilling for Trump.
There’s almost nothing more serious for this country than the possibility that the occupant of the Oval Office is working on behalf of a foreign adversary. But smug and pompous Carlson could not be bothered to go over what alarmed the country’s top law enforcement agency. Instead, he sabotaged them with lies.
CARLSON: By the way, the allegations are not true. The FBI did not find that Donald Trump is a Russian agent. No charges were ever filed against him.
FACT CHECK: Carlson almost certainly has no idea what the FBI found. According to the Times (and Carlson did not refute this), special counsel Robert Mueller took over the investigation “days after F.B.I. officials opened it.” For all we (and Carlson) know, Mueller is still investigating.
CARLSON: But an equally important question remains unanswered: how did this happen? …
Well, thanks to the Times’ story, we have some sense of the answer. …. The FBI assumed that Donald Trump might be a Russian agent not because of anything he did in secret but because of things he said in public.
Carlson played clips of Trump saying, during the 2016 campaign, how much he’d like to get along with Russia.
CARLSON: According to the FBI, the words you just heard are evidence that Trump may have betrayed this country. That’s their view. But there’s another way to look at those words. Maybe Trump is right. … Is there some reason, then, that we should inherently be in conflict with Russia? Is there, moreover, some vast public support in this country for fighting a proxy war in Syria with the Kremlin? And how many parents are willing to send their kids to die for the territorial integrity of Ukraine, an issue that we’re supposed to think is very important? Well, outside a few neighborhoods in Washington, not very many people, it turns out.
… In Washington, saying [what Trump said about Russia] out loud is considered treason.
FACT CHECK: This is a huge distortion, if not an outright lie about what concerned the FBI. In the first place, as I said before, Carlson has no idea what information the FBI has. Secondly, the Times article itself states that it was Trump’s behavior around the firing of then-FBI director James Comey that prompted the investigation. Another red flag was Trump’s calling on Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails. Third, the article implied that the FBI had more information than we know of when it reported that former FBI officials said critics “were not privy to all of the evidence and argued that sitting on it would have been an abdication of duty.”
Carlson wasn’t done with his dishonesty. He played a clip of Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, discussing the article on State of the Union yesterday. Warner listed a host of concerning issues about Trump and Russia. Along with the request for Russia to hack Clinton’s emails, Warner cited Trump’s efforts to conceal details of his conversations with Putin, Trump’s campaign manager “sharing proprietary campaign data with a known Russian agent,” and Trump’s “kowtowing” to Putin in Helsinki where Trump took Putin’s word over U.S. intelligence agencies about Russia’s interference in our election. (Flashback: even Carlson said back then, “I’m never OK with an American official siding with a foreign government over our own.”)
Instead of giving viewers a true view of Warner’s comments, Carlson played a clip of him saying that Putin’s policies “were almost being parroted by Donald Trump” and that Trump says “only nice things about Putin,” then told viewers those comments were the only causes of Warner's suspicions.
CARLSON: Never spoke ill about Russia. That’s the evidence a United States senator holds up to prove that the president may be working for our enemies.
Either Carlson never reviewed the actual interview he was citing, which is shockingly negligent for a prime time cable host, or else he was lying.
From there, Carlson took his bogus claim that "POLICY DIFFERENCES ARE NOW CRIMINAL OFFENSES," as the lower-third banner stated, and ramped up his attacks on Trump critics. “It’s an attempted coup,” he said about the FBI. He slyly likened the situation to a third-world country, apparently counting on the fact that nobody would notice his own behavior could not be more helpful to a banana republic(an) dictator.
In short, Carlson is not just spreading misinformation in service of sweeping Trump’s suspicious behavior under the carpet, he’s undermining our democracy in the process.
Watch Carlson spread poison that could not make Putin happier below, from the January 14, 2019 Tucker Carlson Tonight.
Heard two suggestions yesterday that tickled me:
1. When Trump and Pence are exposed as Russian agents/puppets, President Pelosi should appoint Hillary as her VP. Then immediately resign.
2. That Jeff Bezos should buy Fox ‘News’ from Wrinkled Rupert after the Trump/Republican implosion (at a bargain basement price, obviously) and turn it into a proper news channel.
I’d like to pick Tucker’s sophistry apart piece by piece but it would end up a huge comment nobody would want to read. Suffice to say I haven’t seen so much bulls—t spew from someone’s mouth in a long time.