CNN's Brooke Baldwin Rips Fox News Over Brazen Gaslighting

By Aliza Worthington — December 10, 2019

Brooke Baldwin and her guests ripped Fox News for pretending the IG report on the origins of the Russia investigation proved Trump and his cronies at Fox RIGHT. Bootlickers like Hannity, Ingraham, and Carlson have all been bleating that the report concludes there WAS spying on the Trump campaign, and there WAS a witchhunthoaxdeepstate thing going on. Well, okay, but not if you actually READ the report.

Baldwin discussed this with former Republican Congressman Charllie Dent, and author Amanda Carpenter, who wrote Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies To Us. Kinda perfect choice, no? You have nearly the entirety of Fox News, America's Attorney General Bill Barr, and the president gaslighting the nation on the regular, and it is anybody's guess if we'll ever recover from the damage. Carpenter explained what was so dangerous.

CARPENTER: Well, it's damaging, because our institutions are being used to propagate the idea the Trump campaign was spied upon en masse, and I think Bill Barr is most dangerous player in this drama, because he's being so tricky about the way he's talking. He went in front of the cameras today and said, essentially, there was spying. If you go back to his confirmation hearing, he was saying the same thing. He is equating spying with any kind of surveillance that happened. Spying denotes there was something illegal, that there was something improper.

Except there wasn't. There were three people surveilled in the campaign, and it turns out there was good reason for it. That is not spying. FISA warrants were properly obtained for that surveillance. Yet, Fox News, Trump, and Barr are ALL still using the word "spying" and "hoax" when referring to FBI activity. This doesn't mean mistakes weren't made, but as Carpenter pointed out, honest organizations admit when mistakes are made. DISHONEST organizations manipulate that honesty for their own purposes.

Baldwin asked what it says about the state of things when Jim Comey's own mother-in-law is slurping up Fox News and worried he'll go to jail?

DENT: I'll tell you what, Brooke. Here's the problem. I think a lot of ordinary Americans go about their lives, they're very busy, and they maybe don't distinguish between the newscasters on these shows, the people who are real journalists on these shows, versus the opinion folks and conflate the two. They're watching Fox, where they have some very real news people there, and they have opinion people, and I think that people just don't distinguish —

BALDWIN: It gets muddy.

DENT: It's very muddy. And that's a problem. Believe me, I used to get those conversations from my mother-in-law too. She'd see things, be concerned. Call me. I'd have to calm her down, it's all gonna be okay, because they believe in what they're hearing.

Dent weighed in on the danger of Bill Barr, as well. Baldwin asked him what he thought about the fact that the guy in charge of the DOJ saying he disagreed with his own report. Dent put it in perspective.

DENT: Well, look. My view on this is spying is a very loaded term. Surveillance is a lot less loaded. Christopher Wray, I give him a lot of credit. He stood up, defended his people, even acknowledging they certainly fell short of their own policies and procedures in respect to Carter Page. And it seemed like Chris Wray was speaking to his people, speaking down, and Bill Barr speaking up to the president. And I think it's really stunning the Attorney General and FBI director are not on the same page on this issue, and that the FBI director is out to defending his department, his agency, and the Attorney General is not. It's stunning.

Well, I think we all know what happens to people who defend their organizations and themselves to the president, don't we? We know the fate of those who stand up to this administration, right? I hope Christopher Wray is polishing up his resumé.

I don’t know what report current Director of the FBI Christopher Wray was reading, but it sure wasn’t the one given to me. With that kind of attitude, he will never be able to fix the FBI, which is badly broken despite having some of the greatest men & women working there!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 10, 2019