Nearly two weeks after former Trump administration adviser Steve Bannon called for the beheadings of Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray, Sinclair’s Eric Bolling invited him on his program to peddle election conspiracy theories and a Trump campaign plot to discard the results of the 2020 presidential election. During the interview, Bolling failed to mention Bannon’s ghastly call for violence.

Bolling’s interview with Bannon has been available for streaming on the websites of multiple Sinclair-owned or -operated stations since Wednesday evening, and his program America This Week typically airs on several dozen Sinclair stations over the weekend. During this interview, which has not yet aired on Sinclair’s network of local TV stations, Bolling invited Bannon to elaborate on conspiracy theories related to Dominion Voting Systems, whose voting machines were used in several locations.

To be clear, these claims that Bolling and Bannon are commenting on are deranged, false, and were debunked approximately a week before the interview was streamed. A tweet from Trump expressing the conspiracy theory both in more detail and in all caps apparently spurred a response from the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council Executive Committee and the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Council, which said in a joint statement on November 12 that “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” (In response, Trump fired the head of the Department of Homeland Security agency that had released the statement.) Fox News has also been pushing this false conspiracy theory, but Bolling still asked Bannon if the network is “moving away from President Trump.”

Besides that conspiracy theory, they also spent time discussing one of the Trump campaign’s strategies to steal the election by blocking enough state vote certifications so that Biden would fail to reach 270 electoral votes, forcing the House of Representatives to decide the election. 

But something which Bolling failed to bring up was Bannon’s comments on November 5 calling for Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray to be beheaded and their heads to be put “on pikes … at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats.” A teaser for the interview indirectly referenced Bannon's call for violence, but Bolling failed to mention it during the conversation.

After Bannon made his comments about Fauci, Twitter permanently banned him from the platform -- which Bannon complained about during the interview without mentioning why it happened. But it seems for Sinclair, such violent commentary bears no consequences and you can still get a platform to spread conspiracy theories to local TV stations.