Just like Fox News knew Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, it knows the indictment evidence against Donald Trump is strong. Instead of standing for the rule of law, the Murdoch network is attacking it.

Last week, I wrote a post for Crooks and Liars about former Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissmann’s prediction that today’s indictment would bring a “flat-out assault on the rule of law and the courts.” Sadly, he has been proven all too right.

Media Matters notes that this latest set of charges includes the ones “Fox News’ propagandists were most involved in enabling.”

Trump is charged with four criminal counts: conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding; and conspiracy against rights. The charges stemmed from his efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election.

Trump’s efforts, in turn, depended on the complicity of right-wing media outlets like Fox to participate in his lies that the election had been rigged through massive voter fraud, which served as the pretextual justification for his scheme. This is particularly true for the fake elector scheme, which was widely promoted on Fox at the time.

I think Fox News would be working overtime to defend Trump regardless, for all the same reasons it helped promote what the top personnel knew were lies about the “stolen” 2020 election, i.e. to pander to both their viewers and the MAGA stars. Also, it appears Fox shares with MAGA world a love of fascism and a hatred for democracy.

In any event, the fact of the matter is that Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch are allowing their network to further assault our democracy.

Examples:

Fox host Jesse Watters dismissed both the Mar-a-Lago stolen classified documents case and Jan. 6 as nothingburgers, but called the indictments “political war crimes” against Trump.

Fox legal analyst Jonathan Turley called the latest indictment “the criminalization of disinformation” thus trivializing the seriousness of what Trump intended to do.

Fox host Mark Levin, who was involved in the coup plot, ranted on his radio show, “This is a war against the country. That's exactly what it is. Jack Smith has destroyed our electoral system.” Project much, Mr. Levin?

But my “favorite” so far is Laura Ingraham. She’s an attorney who clerked for Clarence Thomas. She may be as corrupt as he is but she knows darned well there’s good evidence that her beloved Donald Trump is guilty of some very serious crimes against this country.

Ingraham’s nose should have started growing when she said, “[Trump’s] crime was believing and saying that the election was rigged. That's what they want to send him to jail for. Now, excuse me. How is that any different from when the Democrats complained that things were rigged in 2016?”

Uh, it’s different because the Democrats did not try to bully state officials into overturning the election results, use fraudulent electors to obstruct the certification of the vote and incite an assault on the Capitol after being repeatedly told by officials there was no fraud, and losing dozens of lawsuits to that effect. That’s not counting Rudy Giuliani, obviously un-indicted Co-Conspirator 1, who smeared innocent election workers as fraudsters, which he has since recanted in the wake of their defamation lawsuit.

INGRAHAM: Why did Jack Smith decide to hand down this absurd political diatribe today? Well, I'm sure the timing is purely coincidental. Now, not only is Biden at 40% approval -- a low now -- in that new CBS poll, he's plummeting in the polls against Trump. They're basically even across the country. And Trump is dominating, meanwhile, in the GOP primary. It doesn't look like anyone's going to be able to stop him right now.

Notice something missing there? Unlike Smith, Ingraham had no actual evidence for her claim about Smith’s decision, just innuendo and venom.

Ingraham went on to claim that Biden is “wobbling under the weight of his own longstanding corruption” as the result of yesterday’s Devon Archer testimony, even though Archer said no such thing.

“We all know what this is. This is just another in a long line of political hit jobs under the guise of federal law enforcement,” Ingraham continued. Then she began gaslighting about the January 6th insurrection with words that would have made #LyingTucker Carlson proud. "They've charged grandmothers and military vets who merely walked into the Capitol through an open door. And they did that to send a message to the public at large: do not even think about standing up for someone like Donald Trump again. Don't think about it. We could send you to jail.”

Apparently, Ingraham has forgotten her texts on Jan. 6, but I have not. On Jan. 6, Ingraham was obviously alarmed at what was happening. She texted Trump Chief-of-Staff Mark Meadows, "“Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy,"

Ingraham added tonight, “And now they're indicting a former president of the United States to protect Biden and the entire D.C. establishment from scrutiny.”

You can watch Ingraham lie through her teeth, while wearing an ostentatious cross, below, from the August 1, 2023 The Ingraham Angle, via Media Matters.