Despite her spoken disavowal, Fox News host Harris Faulkner did much to enable and sanitize her guest’s reckless claim that the FBI may have planned to assassinate Donald Trump. Even worse, she ignored signs that the FBI saw evidence of Trump collusion during the campaign.
As I previously posted, guest Kevin Jackson took a baseless and inflammatory shot against the FBI in Fox’s Operation Destroy Mueller Investigation on Outnumbered today. Faulkner and cohost Sandra Smith quickly interrupted to note that the accusation was not credible. But Faulkner hardly shot it down with the kind of disregard it deserved. In fact, she almost helped validate it.
Let’s look at the ways Faulkner enabled the recklessness:
Faulkner ignored damning evidence about Trump as she painted the FBI as the wrongdoers
Before turning to Jackson for comment, Faulkner opened the discussion with a conspiracy-theory friendly recounting of events:
FAULKNER: [Deputy FBI Director] Andrew McCabe is set to testify behind closed doors with the House Intelligence Committee. They’re expected to ask the FBI’s number two person about a lot! Including Peter Strzok. Strzok is the DOJ [sic] official booted off Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation several months ago. Strzok sent anti-Trump text messages to an alleged mistress, FBI lawyer Lisa Page. One of those text messages reads, quote, “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office (we believe that’s Andrew McCabe) that there’s no way he gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”
Congressman Trey Gowdy will be among those leading the questions today. He wants to get to the bottom of that particular text message among some other things.
(VIDEO CLIP)
GOWDY: Andrew McCabe cuts across every facet of every investigation in 2016 that your viewers are interested in, from Secretary Clinton’s email to the investigation into the Trump campaign – he’s the deputy director of the FBI so there are a ton of questions, including the one you made reference to, the meeting between Agent Strzok and Lisa Page in, quote, “Andy’s office.” We need to make sure that was Andy McCabe and if they were coming up with a quote, “insurance policy” in case Donald Trump won, that is devastating.
FACT CHECK: Here are some “devastating” facts left out of Faulkner’s ostensibly objective introduction: Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal, a sister company to Fox News, reported that the “insurance policy” referred to in Strzok’s email was the Russia investigation. He was allegedly responding to Page’s concern that the investigation could take its time because Hillary Clinton would likely win the election.
The Wall Street Journal reporter who wrote the story, Del Quentin Wilber explained why that’s very plausible in a series of tweets. He noted that other texts by Strzok back up this interpretation. For example, Wilber wrote: “A few days before the ‘insurance’ text, [Strzok] says: ‘OMG I CANNOT BELIEVE WE ARE SERIOUSLY LOOKING AT THESE ALLEGATIONS AND THE PERVASIVE CONNECTIONS.’ then: ‘What the hell has happened to our country????’ He appears flabbergasted by what he has seen.”
Wilber plausibly suggested that had the FBI been plotting an “insurance policy” to prevent a Trump win, they would have more likely leaked this information about Russia before the election.
Meanwhile, Aaron Blake, at The Washington Post, offers more credence, including the fact that in the hundreds of text messages Strzok and Page intended to be private, there is no indication they did anything to prevent Trump from becoming president.
Yet Faulkner never noted any of the above.
Faulkner gave Jackson the mildest of rebukes for his outlandish smear of the FBI
It’s shocking for a supposedly legitimate news analyst, which is how Jackson was presented, to argue that the FBI may have planned to assassinate Trump and it’s even worse that Jackson admitted his only grounds for such speculation was that it had been “floated” “out there” on social media. Yet Faulkner suggested that the only reason she felt the need to step in and correct Jackson was because his comments might go viral:
FAULKNER: All right, because I know how things get clipped on social media, I just want to make sure that we press in on the fact that no one has floated any sort of an idea that it was an attempt…
JACKSON: Oh, it’s been floated. When I talk about this, I’m talking about social media stuff and, you know, that’s out there, I’m not talking about media sources.
SMITH): Nothing credible.
Faulkner Gave Jackson Undeserved Credibility
Jackson has a long history of inflammatory, race-baiting and outright dishonest comments on Fox: He has said, “liberals created” the Charleston shooter; “America needs a white, Republican president” as well as a white, Republican mayor of Baltimore – on Fox News. He accused Colin Kaepernick of giving money to terrorists and he blamed police shootings on Barack Obama’s sympathy for Black Lives Matter protests.
Yet Jackson didn’t seem to think, or else he didn’t care, that his admittedly baseless attacks on the FBI, much worse than anything Obama said, might put FBI agents’ lives in danger.
Nor did Faulkner mention that.
See how Fox outsources some of its worst commentary with a wink and a nod below, from the December 19, 2017 Outnumbered, via Media Matters.