New testimony released by the January 6 committee demolished the lies that Sean Hannity, his Fox colleagues and Trump World told in order to make it look like Trump tried to protect the U.S. Capitol ahead of the Jan. 6 siege.
Although Fox is doing its best to ignore, smear and discredit the very damning January 6th hearings, the fact that Hannity and other Trump toadies are so desperately peddling the lie that Donald Trump tried to deploy the National Guard, but was prevented from doing so by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, strongly suggests that Hannity, et al. know full well that Trump’s malfeasance has been exposed.
From Media Matters:
In an attempt to undermine the House January 6 select committee, Fox News launched an entire-network offensive to repeatedly — with little evidence — claim that outgoing President Donald Trump had called thousands of National Guard troops to secure the Capitol in the days prior to the insurrection.
Nobody played a bigger role in this misinformation machine than Sean Hannity, who pushed the lie hundreds of times in total, and at least on 43 episodes of his prime-time Fox show, and 48 editions of his daily radio show. (His Fox spot earns him almost 3 million viewers, and the latter garners him over 13 million.)
As Chris Hayes showed last night, at least one of those episodes included Trump's former Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller and his chief of staff, Kash Patel, claiming, as Patel put it, that Trump “unequivocally authorized up to 20,000 National Guards men and women for us to utilize.” When Hannity asked if they had said that “under oath, under the threat of penalty of perjury,” Miller replied, “Oh, absolutely, Sean.”
Actually, he absolutely did not.
On Tuesday, the January 6 committee released video of Miller telling the committee “there was no order from the president.” That statement directly contradicted a comment from Mark Meadows, played by the committee, promoting the same lie about the National Guard also made on Fox News.
To remove any doubt: Not only did Donald Trump fail to contact his Secretary of Defense on January 6th (as shown in our hearing), Trump also failed to give any order prior to January 6 to deploy the military to protect the Capitol.
— January 6th Committee (@January6thCmte) July 26, 2022
Here is Secretary Miller’s testimony— pic.twitter.com/joucnUHvBB
Hayes did a terrific job of breaking down the disinformation effort last night. The misinformers and disinformers included #LyingKayleigh McEnany, who subsequently became a Fox cohost:
HAYES: So, one of the questions that has lingered in the year and a half since the violent attack on January 6th is why the Capitol Police were basically left alone to defend themselves and all the lawmakers inside the building, not to mention the seat of the U.S. government. How could it be that there was no plan to support them ahead of a day that Donald Trump teased would be, quote, wild? And why did it take so long for backup to arrive on the 6th when it was clear the Capitol Police were overwhelmed? We saw it on television. Where was the National Guard?
Well, beginning that very afternoon, the Trump White House attempted to tamp down those concerns with a big lie. Hours into the attack, Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany tweeted, “At President @realDonaldTrump’s direction, the National Guard is on the way.” Not true. Just a lie. Not true. Donald Trump never directed the National Guard to go to the Capitol.
Hayes played a clip of Trump saying, on January 7th, that he had “immediately deployed the National Guard and federal law enforcement to secure the [Capitol] building and expel the intruders.” Trump sounded like he was in a hostage video.
HAYES: We now know, thanks to testimony to the January 6 committee, Donald Trump's staff had to convince him to make that speech, the January 7th one, in the first place. And when he finally agreed, practically the first thing out of his mouth was that lie: “I deployed the National Guard.”
It had already been debunked. The New York Times' reporting on the evening of January 6th that Trump, quote, rebuffed and resisted requests to mobilize the National Guard. And in the end, it was Vice President Mike Pence who approved the order to deploy.
We know that Lachlan Murdoch and Rupert Murdoch know the truth about Trump’s refusal to try to stop the insurrection. The editorial board of the Murdoch-controlled Wall Street Journal blasted Trump last week, saying, “He refused [to protect the Capitol]. He didn’t call the military to send help. He didn’t call Mr. Pence to check on the safety of his loyal VP. Instead, he fed the mob’s anger and let the riot play out.”
Yet the Murdochs apparently have no problem with their Fox "News" Channel spreading disinformation saying, in effect, the opposite. The network didn’t even require Hannity to correct the record for their viewers after his own star guest had all but admitted to lying on the air. Media Matters noted that Hannity “failed to correct – or even mention – his monthslong error-ridden campaign to distort the former president’s reaction to the January 6 insurrection attack” on the afternoon or evening of July 26th (the day the committee released Miller’s testimony). If Hannity said anything about the matter last night on his Fox show, it must have been so brief that I missed it.
You can watch Hayes demolish the lying liars below, from MSNBC’s July 27, 2022 All In with Chris Hayes.
The lazy journalists are wont to take an objectively HUGE story on Trump’s GOP and give equal time to a minor shortcoming on the Dem side as “balance”. Instead of comparing apples to oranges (which are roughly the same size), they’re comparing watermelons to raisins.
Noted that some large advertisers body has reclassified Fox to their bottom rating for truth-telling and reliability in its advice to member companies. Sorry, I can’t remember the source or the specifics even with a news search. I guess it will be re-reported in business journals.
