Fox & Friends celebrates Barr pushing baseless claim that “spying did occur on the Trump campaign”
Steve Doocy uses Barr's claim to justify Trump's wiretapping lie
Written by Media Matters Staff
Published
From the April 11 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends:
STEVE DOOCY (CO-HOST): [Attorney General Bill Barr] was queried by Sen. [Jeanne] Shaheen about his plan to review the Department of Justice's actions investigating the president. And then. that is the passage where he inserted, essentially, a bomb that blew up Washington, D.C. He said spying did occur on the Trump campaign and the question is whether or not it was legal.
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DOOCY: So there you go. He's not saying that anything illegal happened. He just wants to look into it. One of the senators said, so you've put together a team. He said, I haven't put together a team. I've got people just looking at what happened.
AINSLEY EARHARDT (CO-HOST): Well and that's good.
DOOCY: It is.
EARHARDT: If he is concerned about that, that that happened, then they are going to look into it, get to the bottom of it. It's the word spying that is so shocking. Because we knew that Carter Page was being surveyed based on the dossier -- the unverified dossier.
DOOCY: Right. And remember Donald Trump, when he tweeted out, “Hey, I was wiretapped in Trump Tower” --
EARHARDT: Right, in Trump Tower.
DOOCY: I'm sure after he heard the attorney general say yeah, there was spying, he's going, “told you. Hello.”
BRIAN KILMEADE (CO-HOST): When you think about Rick -- when you think about Mike Flynn, how Sally Yates knew that to warn the administration about what Mike Flynn might have been up to. When you find out about everything that was going on with Carter Page and [George] Papadopoulos, you say to yourself, why is this one word and three letters so new to everybody? Why is it so foreign? Why do people think it's such a third rail? Because you weren't paying attention, you only were watching the Mueller report as you thought that Donald Trump perhaps was guilty. You weren't looking at what led to the Mueller report. I think we've done a good job on this couch and on this channel of looking at both sides. Mr. Mueller is looking at the Trump tower meeting. Mueller wants to know what happened with these relationships with Paul Manafort. OK. And at the same time we would like to know what launched this investigation? We saw both sides, most of us here were not shocked. Democrats could not believe what they were hearing.
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EARHARDT: If a presidential candidate is being spied on shouldn't everyone be concerned about that to find out why that's happening? If this were happening --
DOOCY: To use the mechanisms of the federal government to spy on a political opponent. Unbelievable.
EARHARDT: Exactly, the FISA court. If the roles were reversed, if we found out that Hillary Clinton's campaign was being spied on, don't you think everyone would be upset about that? It's such a double standard. What's wrong with just asking how this happened, if there is spying, we want to know more information about it, period?
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KILMEADE: We know they were surveilling the Trump campaign. We know they were looking into it. We know all the people that were there because they have been in trouble since -- they have been front and center. In the Papadopoulos case he actually went to jail. How did they find out about that? They ended up talking to an ambassador. They ended up listening in. So here is what they are saying. Whether or not he's saying predicated, we don't know if there was a good reason to do that. But it's worth asking why they did it.
DOOCY: Yeah, they just want to make sure all the regulations were followed. And if they were, nobody's getting in trouble. But if they weren't, somebody is going to get in trouble.
Related:
CNN: Barr says spying on Trump campaign 'did occur,' but provides no evidence
Wash. Post: Timeline: The birth of the Russia investigation
Previously:
The Mueller probe is over. Now Fox News wants retaliatory investigations.
DOJ revealed that Trump lied about Obama wiretapping him. Fox News covered it for 30 seconds.