Fox News Goes All in on New Theory: Whistleblower Had ‘Outside Help’ Crafting His Complaint

Fox News has gone all in on a theory that the whistleblower who filed a complaint over President Donald Trump’s call with the president of Ukraine received “outside help” in crafting the document.

The theory first appeared in a New York Post op-ed on Thursday, in which former Trump administration aide Fred Fleitz pitched the idea that the complaint was too “polished” to have been written by the whistleblower, even though the anonymous person in question is a CIA officer — as identified by the New York Times — who is presumably well-versed in legalese. There is also no hard evidence proving that he worked in tandem with a third-party

“My suspicions grew this morning when I saw the declassified whistleblowing complaint. It appears to be written by a law professor and includes legal references and detailed footnotes. It also has an unusual legalistic reference on how this complaint should be classified,” wrote Fleitz, after accusing the “so-called whistleblower” of “pursuing a political agenda” with their complaint. “From my experience, such an extremely polished whistleblowing complaint is unheard of.”

Talking points from the Post op-ed were then promoted by Fox & Friends, as the show’s host Steve Doocy paraphrased Fleitz’s theory on air, saying, “It looks like the leaker had outside help, because it looks like it was written by a law professor. [Fleitz] said perhaps it was written by congressional members or staff — and House Republicans, when they get the whistleblower under oath, need to ask him whether or not he spoke to the press or Congress.”

During an interview with White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley, Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade insisted that the whistleblower’s complaint was “extremely well written and well produced, in a way in which people wonder about how much help he had.”

Fox News commentator and Trump’s former personal attorney Jay Sekulow also pushed the theory on the airwaves on Friday after a Fox & Friends host asked if he thinks “they had [outside] help.”

“Look at the phraseology, the endnotes and the footnotes,” replied Sekulow. “This wasn’t drafted by a whistleblower — by, uh, this individual — this was written by a law firm, and you know what, the American people see it for what it is.”

During the same show, Fox News host Jeanine Pirro said “there’s no question” that a third-party penned the complaint while  claiming that the whistleblower instigated a “setup” against the president.

The same kind of speculation was pushed on Fox News’ America Newsroom in two separate segments.

“I would like to know who helped the whistleblower put together the complaint because it sure seems to have been written by high professional abilities,” Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) told anchors Jon Scott and Sandra Smith. “It seemed like a legal document rather than just somebody saying hey, I have a complaint, there were footnotes and everything else.”

Former Department of Justice official Tom Dupree noted earlier in the program that the whistleblower “probably was acting in concert with a lawyer” in an attempt to craft a “focused legal case against the president of the United States.”

A New York Times story on Thursday included limited details about the whistleblower and the lead-up to their complaint being filed, noting that a CIA officer took issue with Trump pushing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into doing him a “favor” by launching an investigation into leading 2020 Democratic candidate Joe Biden. The Times story noted that the CIA officer shared his concerns with the intelligence agency’s top lawyer via an anonymous submission; he then followed protocol by bringing the misconduct claims to officials at the DOJ and White House, while also filing the separate complaint that has since been de-classified and released to the public.

The whistleblower’s lawyers declined to comment on the bureaucratic details behind the complaint, as Andrew Bakaj of Compass Rose Legal Group, the whistleblower’s top counsel, told the paper, “Any decision to report any perceived identifying information of the whistleblower is deeply concerning and reckless, as it can place the individual in harm’s way. The whistleblower has a right to anonymity.”

Watch the clips above, via Fox News.