Fox Host Ainsley Earhardt: ‘Not Factually Correct’ to Report Trump Could Faces Charges After Leaving Office

Fox & Friends host Ainsley Earhardt attacked ABC, CBS, and NBC for covering Robert Mueller’s congressional hearings in a supposedly incorrect manner — but the Big Three coverage Earhardt pointed to merely reported the words that came straight from the former special counsel’s mouth.

Earhardt made the comments Thursday morning while analyzing “some of the headlines from some of the nightly newscasts” on Mueller’s Wednesday hearings.

“[Mueller] said that the president should be indicted but you can’t indict a sitting president, and then he had to correct himself later because it contradicted his statement that he released with the DOJ — he said something about, we couldn’t come up with a determination. Which means that they couldn’t find crime,” the Fox News host claimed. “But if you watched ABC, watched CBS, NBC — ABC said Trump could still face criminal charges after he leaves office. That is not necessarily true. If you watch CBS, it says that he was not cleared of any wrongdoing.”

“They have a message they’re trying to get out that is not factually correct,” Earhardt said.

Earhardt’s fact check appears to need a fact check of its own: Mueller specifically said the president could be charged after his White House tenure and the three major networks merely covered that portion of the testimony.

In response to a line of questioning from Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) regarding if Trump could be charged “with a crime after he left office,” Mueller replied “yes.”

After Buck clarified with a follow up — asking, “Ethically? Under the ethical standards?” — Mueller expounded upon the chances of Trump being charged post-White House, as the Office of Legal Counsel opinion on not charging a sitting president will no longer apply:

“I’m not certain because I haven’t looked at the ethical standards. OLC opinion says that the prosecutor, while he cannot bring a charge against a sitting president, nonetheless, he can continue the investigation to see if there are any other persons who might be drawn into the conspiracy.”

After Earhardt’s guest, conservative blogger Mollie Hemingway, accused “the media” of being “so heavily implicated in the Russia collusion narrative, the other stuff, they can’t report on this fairly or honestly,” the host affirmed her sentiment.

“It is not their job to exonerate. It is their job to find out if a crime was committed, and that didn’t happen here,” Earhardt opined.

UPDATE: Earhardt took to the Fox News airwaves on Friday to clarify her comments, saying, “Can I clarify something that I said yesterday about the president being indicted? A president can be indicted when he leaves office. I know that. I was questioning whether this president will be indicted based on the Mueller report. That’s it.”

Watch above, via Fox News.

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