Fox’s Outnumbered Not Thrilled With Trump’s Mueller and Sessions Tweets: ‘Kind of Ridiculous’
On Fox News Channel’s Outnumbered on Monday, the hosts and guest, Fox Business anchor Charles Payne, discussed the Special Counsel investigation at length, and at one point expressed some exasperation with how President Trump is handling things on Twitter.
Co-host Lisa Kennedy, in the clip above from Fox News, asked Fox’s Melissa Francis what the impact might be if it turns out, in the end, that Robert Mueller has nothing and the President is exonerated.
Francis says that the investigation would have served its purpose because, after all, the point was to find out what happened. She also referred back to a previous discussion with National Review‘s Andrew McCarthy, a former prosecutor himself, pointing out that the President’s Tweets are just antagonizing the prosecutor for, assuming Trump is innocent, no reason.
“He says the president should stop tweeting because he is trash talking and antagonizing someone working on the case,” she recalled. “He said himself he’d be mad if it were him.”
Host Harris Faulkner agreed about the concerns for the investigation “lingering” after it ends, referring back to remarks from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) last week. “You have to let it play out with patience,” she said.
It was Charles Payne who really laid it out in stark terms, though.
“This sort of dovetails to what Melissa was saying, in a sense, that if you discredit it every day and then they come out in your favor, have you discredited, you know–” he said. In other words, that going out and trashing an investigation and investigators who may exonerate you ends up discrediting your own exoneration potentially.
“The bottom line is that it’s, at this point, you know, there’s still talk occasionally of getting Sessions to act,” he said, “and I feel like we’ve run at least half of a marathon and to run back to the finish line would be kind of ridiculous.”
Payne is obviously referring to the many tweets from the President, and the overall talk among Trump devotees like Fox’s Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, and Lou Dobbs, who keep insisting that Attorney General Jeff Sessions shut the investigation down. Payne is arguing that it is a ridiculous thing to tweet, and to do, to go all the way back to the stage of trying to stop the investigation. Like Faulkner pointed out Sen. Graham saying, that it’s better to let it play out.
Kennedy referred back to Payne’s remark about undermining one’s own exoneration. “Charles brings up a really good point,” she said. “Because if in fact the president is exonerated, it sort of undermines the tweet.”
Co-host Katie Pavlich of Townhall then argued that the investigation is so political that no matter how it ends, one side or the other will refuse to accept the result.
“I just think it’s been so political, politically charged on both sides no matter what the outcome is,” she said, “if special counsel Robert Mueller clears the president and there is no collusion found, then the left will go crazy and they’ll start doing what the right has been doing to say that ‘the investigation was never legitimate’, ‘they didn’t question the right people’, etc etc, and the right will then try to move on.”
“But I doubt that Democrats will let it go,” she said.
Somewhat in contradiction to that assessment, she then said that “the majority of people are sick of” the investigation. “They want it to end,” she said. “And they quite frankly don’t really care about it.”
On Sunday, Fox’s Brit Hume also addressed the president’s tweeting, and likewise used the word “ridiculous.”
Watch the clip above, courtesy of Fox News.
[Featured image via screengrab]
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Follow Caleb Howe (@CalebHowe) on Twitter
