Jake Tapper Calls Out Chris Wallace for Failing to Challenge Trump on Russian-Bounty Report
CNN’s Jake Tapper singled out Fox News anchor Chris Wallace among a slew of others who interviewed President Donald Trump in a raft or television appearances over the last week to ten days. At issue? Their collective failure to challenge the commander in chief on intel reports that Russian operatives were paying the Taliban bounties for the killing of U.S. military deployed in Afghanistan.
“Nowhere in the president’s comments nor in the questions to him in these one-on-one interviews was there any mention of three U.S. Marines who are worth discussion,” the anchor of State of the Union noted.
According to The New York Times, the Pentagon and others are investigating whether three servicemen were killed as a result of efforts by the Russian Military Intelligence, the GRU, to aid the Taliban and other terrorists, specifically about payments by the GRU.
“That’s right. Even in the wake of this news, interviewers posed questions about tweets, questions about whether the president is too mean to the interviewer,” Tapper added, an unmistakable shot at Wallace. “Nothing about the Russia bounty story or those three marines. Not one word.”
Wallace devoted several minutes of his interview to confronting Trump about Twitter attacks the president had made on Wallace himself.
Wallace was widely lauded for what many considered tough White House interview, which was ostensibly the first journalistically sound Q&A since Trump sat with NBC News anchor Lester Holt roughly three years ago. On many occasions in the interview, Wallace countered the president’s unverified claims—like that of U.S. mortality rates and Joe Biden’s position on “defund the police.” But, Wallace did not question the president on the Russian bounty story.
Lest anyone missed who Tapper was truly directing his criticism towards, the CNN anchor quote-tweeted a Mediaite story in which Wallace criticized Biden for not sitting down with him a week after the Trump interview.
Speaking of sit down: you had an interview with the president and you asked about mean tweets about you and not about intel reports about GRU bounties against US and UK servicemembers. https://t.co/5uyf7YEL6x
— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) July 26, 2020
Tapper and Wallace are both remarkably well regarded in political media circles, as each often flouts the partisan reputations of their respective employers. Neither is above criticism and in this regard, Tapper’s questioning why Wallace did not ask President Trump about the Russian bounty story is a sound one. Of the interviews singled out by Tapper, Wallace’s was the only one conducted by a hard news personality.
Watch above via CNN.
