It was both the best and worst of verdicts for Fox News—and the two realities the conservative network has lived in over the last two weeks after both Donald Trump and Hunter Biden were convicted for crimes.
CNN’s Abby Phillip skewered Fox News by contrasting their reactions to Hunter Biden’s guilty verdict on Tuesday, showing how many of the network’s anchors did an about-face on the justice system just days after railing against the rule of law in light of Donald Trump’s New York conviction last month.
“Some even claimed the conviction was the end of the republic as we know it,” Phillip said on CNN NewsNight. “But tonight, they seem to be singing from a completely different tune.”
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Phillip played clips of Fox News stars like Jeanine Pirro, Laura Ingraham, and Jesse Watters, all seemingly reinvigorated by the justice system they despised just 12 days prior.
Pirro went from claiming the Trump conviction “goes against the ilk of who we are as Americans and our faith in the criminal justice system” to praising the Biden jury for not being “intimidated” by the president’s family and recognizing “no one is above the law.” Ingraham said the U.S. felt like a “banana republic” last month after Trump was found guilty, but now the Biden family’s “luck ran out” after the verdict. Watters’ claim that Democrats were willing to “destroy the legal system” to convict Trump suddenly turned into “a little boost of confidence” in justice after Tuesday’s verdict.
“Although they still have a lot of work to do,” he caveated, naturally.
The conspiratorial hive mind may have been on full display, Phillip noted, but its discrepancy between the two verdicts—one in state court, the other in federal court—was not rooted in fact.
“You can’t claim the justice system is dead because of a single conviction while also praising it for another, and you can’t claim President Biden is weaponizing the Justice Department to go after his enemies when that same department just convicted his own son,” she said. “But in a world of MAGA, perhaps you can.”
