‘That Was a False Story’: Will Cain Grills Nikki Haley Over ‘Hoax’ She Fell For
Fox News host Will Cain grilled 2024 Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley over a “false story” she fell for in 2020 on Tuesday and asked whether she regretted making a statement on the story without confirming it was true.
On Fox News Tonight, after Haley criticized President Joe Biden and “the leftist” for inserting “race into everything” and pitting people “against each other,” Cain brought up a Twitter post that Haley made in 2020 reacting to the claim that a noose had been found in the garage of NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace, who is Black. The claim ended up being debunked.
“I wanted to ask you about one of your statements from the past,” Cain said. “I do think there are those that cynically seek to divide us based upon race.”
Cain said that while he didn’t think Haley was “one of those people,” there “are also people who readily accept a false premise too quickly, and I was disappointed to see one of your tweets from 2020”:
This was during the Bubba Wallace affair when there was supposedly a noose hung in his garage at a NASCAR race. It turned out to be a hoax and you tweeted at that time that, ‘We should all stand with Bubba Wallace today against the cowards who secretly put the noose in his garage stall. Watch your back, cowards. Bubba has a bigger army than you do.’
“That was a false story. It was a hoax,” Cain said. “It’s been investigated. It’s not true. Why did you accept it as true?”
Haley replied that since she had been partners with NASCAR in South Carolina, where she served as governor between 2011 and 2017, she had “trusted them” and not sought to verify the story herself.
“So when I saw NASCAR came out with that, and they showed all of those race car drivers behind him, I trusted them, and I trusted that they had done their homework. That clearly was not the case,” she said. “But you know, I had had a long relationship with them and I had no reason to doubt them.”
After Cain asked, “So you regret accepting that and trusting that institution in that moment?” Haley said, “Absolutely, and they had never done anything false before.”
“They’re a group that always does their homework. They always are very careful and measured in everything that they do,” she claimed. “And so I trusted friends that I had worked with for years.”
Cain thanked Haley for her “reflection and correction” and said he had wanted to hear her address the incident since Haley is “running to be the leader of the free world, and you have to be able to stand up in that moment and accept the truth or look for the truth when everyone else is telling you a lie.”
Following an investigation, the FBI ruled that the alleged hate crime noose was a “garage door pull rope” and that it had been in the garage since the year prior, long before Wallace was assigned the garage.
“We appreciate the FBI’s quick and thorough investigation and are thankful to learn that this was not an intentional, racist act against Bubba,” said NASCAR in a statement at the time.
Watch above via Fox News.
