Nothing reveals Fox News’ collusion with Donald Trump and vice versa like the bogus accusations that Susan Rice, who just happens to be a high-ranking African American woman in the Obama administration, is the real villain in Trump’s bogus wiretapping accusation And, oh yeah, let's pretend this is more important than any collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Media Matters sums up Fox’s latest fake scandal:
On April 2, alt-right media figure Mike Cernovich reported that former national security adviser Susan Rice requested the unmasking of Trump officials. The next day, Bloomberg’s Eli Lake confirmed that Trump administration lawyers accused Rice of requesting “the identities of U.S. persons in raw intelligence reports on dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and campaign.” Right-wing media figures quickly ran with the report as a “BOMBSHELL,” but according to numerous legal and national security experts, “Rice’s actions are likely legal.”
The Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove has a terrific breakdown of the situation in an article aptly titled, “President Trump Has Become Fox News’s No. 1 Assignment Editor.” Grove reveals a situation reminiscent of Devin Nunes’ Trump-friendly stunt: Fox reporter Adam Housley broke the news about Rice, though he only identified her as someone "very high up, very well known, very senior in the intelligence world, and is not in the FBI." It was information he almost surely got from the Trump administration or someone well-connected to it, but Trump made like it was news to him, then inflated its significance, calling it “big news” in a tweet. On Sunday, Trump tweeted, “The real story turns out to be SURVEILLANCE and Leaking! Find the leakers.”
Fox News has eagerly obliged, parroting Trump’s journalistic judgment with wall to wall coverage since Housely’s [sic] initial report.
[…]
“We’re told that the main issue here is not only the unmasking of the names, but the spreading of names for political purposes that have nothing to do with national security and everything to do with hurting and embarrassing the Trump transition and his team,” Housely [sic] declared.
On Monday’s Fox & Friends, Steve Doocy, Brian Kilmeade, and Abby Huntsman (former Obama administration ambassador and 2012 Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman’s daughter, who has gone hard-right and pro-Trump since her liberal-Republican days on MSNBC’s defunct show The Cycle)—repeatedly touted Housely’s [sic] story.
Yesterday, Fox host Neil Cavuto hosted Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) to promote his call for Rice to face a criminal investigation. Cavuto asked, “Her story does seem to be changing a little bit … Is she making a point or burying herself?”
DeSantis replied, “I think she dug a hole for herself and I think she kind of kept digging today. … I think she needs to come in front of Congress and the intelligence committees, and I think the FBI, clearly they need to be investigating the leaks because those are criminal offenses.”
Last night, Fox hosts and Trump sycophants Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro along with guest Jay Sekulow were so excited at the possibility of “acquitting” Trump by making Rice the crook, they seemed ready to skip any investigation or trial and throw her right in the slammer. Along with Barack Obama. From the Fox News transcript:
SEKULOW: So here’s the political question. Why are we saying it’s OK to be spying on—and I don’t want to even call it surveillance anymore, spying on the president-elect of the United States? Why is that OK?
PIRRO: Well, it’s certainly not OK. And you’ve got the making of a false statement. You’ve got espionage. You’ve got violations of the FISA Act. But I think what’s significant here is the fact that if Obama knew about all this, nobody seems to care. And this goes right to the timeline until it looked like, Oh, my God, they’re taking him seriously. And now what we need to do is—we got to stop. We got to get the dirt. We got to pass it around. And that’s when they started...
(CROSSTALK)
HANNITY: The bottom line here is, under the guise of national security, if they’re unmasking only the conversations with Trump or Trump transition team members or then candidate Trump’s team, that was specifically designed for political purposes having nothing to do with national security!
And guess what? Today, Trump, citing no evidence, suggested Rice had committed a crime.
Watch DeSantis and Cavuto below, from the April 4, 2017 Your World.
Update: Media Matters notes that other right-wingers, such as Rush Limbaugh, have promoted the same Rice smear, along with Fox. But surely Fox, at the very least, was a factor in Trump's thinking.
Keep in mind that all of this horse shit began cuz some constipated elderly man tweeted this out at 5:00am on the toilet. As careful and thoughtful as Obama was with words, Trump is as careless and thoughtless. Can’t wait for the next pearls of wisdom.