Although Fox News seems to be more critical of Trump now, they’re still trying to defend him so the network doesn’t completely lose all of its viewership. Unfortunately, that’s going to backfire.
This morning Fox News anchor Chris Wallace tried to get House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler to tell viewers that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had cleared Trump of “criminal collusion,” and let’s just say — it didn’t go as planned.
As the details of the Mueller report are still unknown, Wallace asked for the “tea leaves” on Fox News Sunday. Wallace framed his question as an assumption of the president’s innocence. He said:
The Justice Department says that the special counselor is not recommending any new indictments. That means that no one will have been — has been or will have been — charged with collusion with the Russians. And President Trump clearly couldn’t do that himself, so in effect, isn’t it a logical assumption that the special counsel did not find any criminal collusion with the Kremlin?”
Nadler’s response would break his heart as the chairman revealed Trump was not in the clear:
Well, all we know is that the special counsel, or we think we know, is that the special counsel is not bringing criminal indictments for collusion. There are other investigations going on which he’s farmed out to the Southern District of New York, the Eastern District of Virginia, and they may or may not.
We do know, remember, in plain sight, of a lot of collusion. We know for example that the president’s son and his campaign manager were present at a meeting with the Russians to receive information which they were told, in the invitation was part of the Russian government’s attempt to help them in the election. We know that the campaign manager gave targeting data, political targeting data, to an agent over the Russian government.
So, you know, we know a lot of things, and maybe it’s not indictable but we know there was collusion. The question is to what degree and for what purpose.”
But Wallace kept trying and dug himself into a hole. He interrupted, “Excuse me, sir, that’s the point I was going to make. Jared Kushner was not charged for that, Paul Manafort was not charged, Don Jr. was not charged, so it would seem that there was no criminal collusion among them, so it would seem to clear the president on that issue.”
And Nadler kept bringing on reality check after reality check. He said:
No, it would not. The Washington Post has a story today which says that encounter intelligence investigations because of the way they are done and because of the way counterintelligence works, very often they do not lead to criminal prosecutions. But these are additional reasons we have to see the report, the entire country, the public, needs to see the entire report, so we can see what the special prosecutor says about these questions. Right now it’s very speculative.”
You can watch the interview below:
Conservatives seem desperate to jump the gun and defend Trump, but this interview reveals that more news is to come.
Featured image via DC Tribune image gallery
