Shortly after the Department of Justice’s inspector general reported there was no political bias, and that the FBI had sufficient evidence to launch the Russia probe on Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace said the real headline should be that the top watchdog “didn’t find the things” that President Trump and Attorney General William Barr have long alleged.
Minutes following Monday’s release of the report, and after other Fox News personalities had already spun the results in a pro-Trump fashion, Wallace explained his view of the findings as “a reporter” and not as a partisan pundit.
“Remember, this comes against the backdrop of Donald Trump talking about the investigation of him in 2016 as a political hit job. At one point he talked about President Obama ordering the wiretapping of Trump Tower,” Wallace said.
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“In one of these hearings, Attorney General Bill Barr talked about the FBI spying on the Trump campaign and later said spying is not a pejorative word. I view it is a perfectly legitimate word and usually people talk about surveillance, not spying, which would seem to have a negative connotation,” the Fox News Sunday host continued.
Wallace noted, however, that when reading through Horowitz’s report, “the headline is they didn’t find the things that Bill Barr and Donald Trump alleged,” adding that the inspector general found “there was no political bias” by FBI leadership.
“So it seems to me that the headline here is that he basically found that the FBI conducted the investigations on the warrant on a proper legal basis,” the Fox anchor reiterated. “There was some misconduct and allegations by individual people but not by any of the higher-ups.”
This wasn’t the first time on Monday that Wallace made decidedly un-Fox News-like comments about Trump-related news. During a break in the House impeachment hearing, Wallace pushed back on Clinton impeachment independent counsel Ken Starr’s assertion that the Trump impeachment was “narrow” and “slanted,” noting it was based on a “much bigger issue” than Bill Clinton lying about sex.
