Somebody doesn’t watch his own network:
“Fox News Sunday” anchor Chris Wallace said Friday he was surprised to see people “rallying” behind ex-national security adviser Michael Flynn, arguing the former Trump administration official should not have lied to the FBI.
Wallace, who was speaking on Fox News, said Flynn erred in speaking to the FBI voluntarily shortly after President Trump was elected.
“Did the FBI play hardball? Yeah. Guess what? The FBI plays hardball. And guess what? If you are talking to the FBI — and a lot of lawyers would say don’t talk to them unless you have to — don’t lie,” he said.
Wallace’s comments came a day after Trump told reporters Thursday that Flynn has been “essentially exonerated” by new documents unsealed in the criminal case against the former aide.
“He’s in the process of being exonerated. If you look at those notes from yesterday, that was total exoneration,” Trump said. “These were dirty, filthy cops at the top of the FBI.”
Wallace said he was also surprised that Trump suggested Flynn might return to the administration.
“I was kind of surprised that the president said yesterday, ‘Well, maybe I’ll bring him back to the White House.’ It was the president, before any legal case was brought, who fired Flynn because Flynn had lied about his conversation with the Russian ambassador to the vice president, Mike Pence,” Wallace said.
“Mike Pence came on ‘Fox News Sunday’ just before the inauguration in January of 2016 and said there was no discussion of that. And it turns out he was basing that on what Flynn had told him and that Flynn had lied to him,” Wallace added. “So I’m not quite sure I understand why people are all rallying to Flynn’s case.”
I appreciate the fact that Wallace is sticking to his old-school conservative worldview. It’s rare enough. But really, Chris, where have you been? Do you not watch your own network? Or listen to what the president of the United States says every day?
This sort of questioning by law enforcement is known to anyone who even watched re-runs of Law and Order, much less anyone who’s followed various crimes and scandals over the years. There was nothing even remotely unusual about what the FBI did when they questioned Flynn. After all, it wasn’t just those phone calls they were interested in. He was also involved in a plot to kidnap a foreign national in the US and send him overseas — for which he had been paid big bucks by a foreign country, while he was advising the Trump campaign. And he was the National Security Adviser!
Lying to the FBI is illegal, even for Donald Trump flunkies. Or, at least, it used to be. Today, they are all under the protection of Attorney General William Barr.