MSNBC star Rachel Maddow falsely accused Fox News of not broadcasting former President Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial on Wednesday.
Maddow reacted to a report by the Politician that Senator James Lankford, R-Oklahoma, was “incredibly shaken” by the footage of the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill presented by impeachment managers in the House of Democrats. The report described Lankford as “teary-eyed” and having to be consoled by Senator Steve Daines, R-Mont.
“It occurs to me now that those of us who covered this story, and the audience who followed the coverage, have seen some (but certainly not all) of those filming before,” Maddow began. “Republican senators who consume mostly or exclusively the conservative media may be seeing this for the first time.”
She then turned her eyes to Fox News.
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“Thinking about it mainly because Fox News Channel is not making the judgment today,” Maddow told 106 million followers on Twitter. “There will be a disconnect between Republican senators seeing all of these things, and their grassroots voters whose news today was, like, cultural warfare things about the NBA or the Christmas War or whatever.”
Fox News broadcast the majority of the impeachment hearing on Wednesday, in addition to the initial statements by impeachment managers and Trump’s legal team on Tuesday.
Fox News also broadcast coverage of the impeachment trial on FoxNews.com.
Maddow’s tweet was released on social media, including by NewsBusters editor-in-chief Curtis Houck.
“It is 100% false to say that the Fox News Channel is not carrying out the trial *, *” Houck I wrote.
Maddow after walked back his tweet to clarify that Fox News broadcast the impeachment trial on Wednesday, but left its initial tweet with the false claim.
MSNBC did not immediately respond to Fox News’s request for comment.
FLASHBACK: RACHEL MADDOW FROM MSNBC QUESTIONS THE LEGITIMACY OF THE TRUMP DAYS PRESIDENCY IN ITS ADMINISTRATION
Although Maddow praised the legitimacy of President Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election, she sang a different tune after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, suggesting that his presidency was illegitimate because of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
“During the final months of our presidential election and until the period of the lame duck before the new president takes office, we – the American people, launched a series of news about the influence of Russia in our election, right? There was a unconfirmed dirt dossier on Donald Trump that the Russian government had allegedly collected and was using against him to make him carry out his orders, “said Maddow during the opening segment of” The Rachel Maddow Show “on January 26, 2017 , less than a week after Trump’s inauguration.
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“This unconfirmed and super-inflammatory information dossier was collected by a respected former British MI6 intelligence officer. It was published online last month, when that former British intelligence officer disappeared immediately,” continued Maddow. “He left the network. His business partner said he did it for his own safety.”
Maddow became the star of MSNBC by promoting the Russian collusion theory between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.
Brian Flood of Fox News contributed to this report.