A Fox News host who brought up the Durham report to suggest that tensions between Ukraine and Russia are being exaggerated by Biden administration officials for political purposes was put in her place by the network’s national security correspondent.
After hearing President Biden say at a press conference late Friday afternoon that he is “convinced” Russia will invade its neighbor, members of The Five panel weighed in.
The situation in eastern Europe “feels very, very manufactured,” said Greg Gutfeld. “And I don’t know what it is.”
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“I know what it is,” asserted co-host Kennedy. “It’s Jake Sullivan,” she said, referring to Biden’s National Security Adviser and a former adviser for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
“And he is in deep yogurt in the Durham probe, and he’s been the one saying, ‘We have so much intelligence an invasion is imminent.’ He said that last Friday. It’s the next Friday, here we are. I don’t think Putin is going to invade.”
The Durham report alleges that former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussman obtained White House data through a tech executive who had legal access to that data. Fox News reported that Sullivan was an unnamed “foreign policy adviser” mentioned in the indictment against Sussman. Since the report’s release last Friday, several Fox News hosts and guests have blown the report way out of proportion, at times making claims that are outright false.
Fox News National Security Correspondent Jennifer Griffin would clearly have none of what Kennedy was saying.
“First of all, I need to level set with the conversation I’ve just been listening to,” she began. “What we are witnessing right now is not something that just changed in the last 24 hours.” Griffin then gave a rundown of the information she’s received over the last few weeks from a variety of sources that points to a Russian attack.
“This is a very different situation than…the Iraq War and WMDs. And how do we know? We’re seeing it with our own eyes,” she said. “If you can’t look at the kind of Iskander missile battalions that are now in Belarus [and] 30,000 Russian troops there. Half of [Putin’s] air force has now been deployed toward Ukraine. I am told just moments ago from a senior defense official that 40 percent of his 190,000 troops who are on the border with Ukraine are now in attack positions. That is something we have been waiting for.”
“Right now, every American should be watching this and knowing that this is deadly serious,” Griffin concluded. She then referenced the 1997 movie Wag the Dog, in which a U.S. president tries to distract the public from a scandal by starting a war in Europe.
“This is not some Wag the Dog situation. To even mention the Durham probe in the same sentence as what we know, and what we can see with our own eyes in terms of the military buildup and knowing what Vladimir Putin is capable of…”
Earlier in the week, Fox’s Maria Bartiromo and conservative talk-radio figure John Catsimatidis also discussed the movie, but argued the opposite: that its plot is exactly what’s happening now. Like Kennedy, Bartiromo claimed the Durham report was a scandal worthy of a distraction.
“[Sullivan] was one of the people who was peddling this Russia collusion lie for four years, and there he is now as [National Security Adviser], coming up with this hysteria over Russia,” she exclaimed. Bartiromo later wondered if the whole thing was “a ruse” because “we were getting this Durham information and we just saw 40-year highs on inflation.”
