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While Washington insiders and most of the American press are falling over themselves and each other trying to keep up with the latest Trump scandals (for the love of God, it's only Tuesday), you might wonder how the nation's worst major news network is handling the news that Donald Trump accidentally or on purpose leaked information to Russian diplomats that is considered so sensitive that no United States newspapers are willing to detail exactly what it is.
You needn't wonder—because at newly Ailes-less, O'Reilly-free Fox News, it's been business as usual.
While CNN and MSNBC provided wall to wall coverage of the breaking news, Fox News defended Trump before returning to coverage of such hard hitting stories as the “Romper for men,” Miss USA’s comments about healthcare, Michelle Obama’s comments about school lunches, “Media Hysteria,” and “leftists” on college campuses
Truly, leftists on college campuses are the defining challenge of our generation. Our allies can spend time fretting over whether or not their most closely-held secrets will be handed over to unfriendly powers if they like, but we here will be asking the hard questions, questions like why are college kids so mean to racists? and Flashback: Former FBI Director James Comey Explains What Was On Clinton's Email Server.
The big guns in the Let's Talk About Something Else fight, however, were reserved for the program that is indisputably and forever the lead paint of news, Fox & Friends. There, the hapless hosts spent the morning hashing out one of the loonier recent conspiracy theories on the far-right (pizzagate not included): the theory that a DNC staffer killed in 2016 was killed for political reasons and possibly by the Clintons because reasons. The evidence presented was, as is the case in most conspiracy theories (pizzagate definitely included), one extremely sketchy guy who said so.
Fox & Friends’ Tuesday morning coverage centered around “an investigator” who now says Rich “was in contact with WikiLeaks before he was murdered.”
“Not only that, but this investigator says there could be a cover-up. Wow,” host Brian Kilmeade said.
Wow, indeed. In reality, however, it's not clear if the would-be investigator bringing this information did any investigating at all; though he claims an affiliation with the family of the murdered man the family quickly distanced themselves from his claims. But just who is this guy, and why is the story he's bringing to Fox & Friends vastly more important than the still-breaking news of a sitting president himself blurting out high-level classified information to an unfriendly power?
The investigator in question is a former DC homicide investigator turned Fox News contributor named Rod Wheeler, who once apologized for his inaccurate reporting about a “national underground network” of gun-toting lesbians that he claimed was terrorizing the Washington, D.C. area.
Yeah, we're done here. You've got to hand it to Fox News—they are not about to let unpleasant reality interfere with each morning's script.