Sparks flew Monday on the Fox News set between Fox News anchor Chris Wallace and conservative contributor Katie Pavlich, with Wallace demanding his colleague get her “facts straight” after Pavlich insisted that certain witnesses had not been called in the impeachment trial.
Moments before President Donald Trump’s defense team began its arguments in the Senate impeachment trial, Pavlich noted during Fox’s pretrial coverage that while Republican senators are now weighing whether to call former National Security Adviser John Bolton following his bombshell claims, the House should have presented a more thorough case.
“The Senate is not the House, the House did not come with a complete case, and every impeachment beforehand, the witnesses that were called had been called in the House before being brought to the Senate,” she insisted. “So there are questions here about the process.”
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“That’s not true, that’s not true," Wallace interrupted. “They hadn’t all been called in the House, and in the Clinton impeachment, they’d been called by the general independent counsel. They had not been called by the House.”
After Pavlich claimed that was due to an “extensive Justice Department investigation,” Wallace agreed but pointed out that she was “just wrong” to claim that all impeachment witnesses were previously called by the House.
“Let me finish. Before the articles were sent to the House, the grand jury material in the Clinton impeachment were handed to the House as part of the articles and given to the Senate,” the right-wing pundit said. “They were not given after the House voted for those articles. That is the difference. The process does matter.”
As anchor Bret Baier attempted to have Wallace give his “final thoughts,” the Fox News Sunday host—who has a history of tangling with the network’s opinion personalities—continued to highlight that what Pavlich said “just isn’t true.”
“The fact of the matter is that the whistleblower information was given to the inspector general, who gave it to the Justice Department,” Wallace declared, clearly perturbed. “The Justice Department decided not to investigate, and that is why it went to the House.”
“So to say that in the Clinton investigation these people were interviewed by the House, one, they weren’t,” he continued. “And to say it wasn’t done by the Justice Department, because the Justice Department refused to carry out the investigation. Get your facts straight!”
“Okay, let’s tone it down,” Baier jumped in.
Wallace tearing into a pro-Trump Fox News contributor came just moments after he said on-air that the news that Bolton claims Trump told him that Ukrainian military aid was frozen unless Ukraine investigated the Bidens was obviously big news since Trump supporters were “spinning like crazy” afterward.
