Fox News national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin just can’t stop at this point.
The highly respected journalist, who has been with Fox News since 1996, has recently gained notoriety for busting a number of right-wing narratives about the Ukraine crisis while on Fox airwaves, schooling her network colleagues in the process. She once again found herself in that position on Sunday night.
Prior to bringing Griffin on to discuss her insights into the latest developments of Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, Fox News host Trey Gowdy interviewed Ret. Col. Douglas MacGregor, a former Trump military adviser, on Russia’s escalating aggression. The frequent Fox News guest, who previously supported Russia’s annexation of Crimea, largely defended Russian President Vladimir Putin’s actions while criticizing both NATO and the United States.
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“We’re imputing to him things he does not want to do in our usual effort to demonize him and his country,” MacGregor declared before saying we “need to remember” that Ukraine has a history of political corruption.
After MacGregror suggested that the U.S. should stop sanctioning Russia and providing military aid to Ukraine, Gowdy asked the ex-military officer if he believes Russia should just be allowed to take whatever portion of Ukraine they want.
“Yes. Absolutely,” MacGregor proclaimed. “I see no reason why we should fight with the Russians over something they have been talking about for years, and we chose to ignore it. And more importantly, the population there is indistinguishable from their own.”
Moments later, Griffin unleashed a lengthy debunking of MacGregor’s Kremlin-friendly analysis.
“I feel like I need to correct some of the things that Col. Douglas MacGregor said, and I’m not sure that 10 minutes is enough time to do so because there were so many distortions in what he just said,” the veteran reporter flatly stated, adding that MacGregor sounded like an “apologist” for Putin.
“I think the world has seen what Putin is capable of,” she continued. “To blame NATO membership for what we’ve seen Putin unleash, we have seen his own words that he is talking in czarist terms, from a 19th-century view of imperial Russia, so what he just said was so distorted that I do feel our audience needs to know the truth.”
Griffin further explained that she has long tracked Putin’s rise throughout her career, pointing out how she started at Fox News by working in its Moscow bureau. Adding that the Russian leader has been laying the groundwork for imperial expansion for decades, she then brought up MacGregor’s own record with the Trump administration.
“The kind of appeasement talk that Col. MacGregor, who should know better—when he was in government, he was the one who was advising Trump to pull all troops out of Germany,” Griffin said. “That projection of weakness is what made Putin think he could move into a sovereign country like Ukraine.”
Gowdy, for his part, said he was “surprised” by MacGregor’s remarks and that he found his “take on it stunning and disappointing.”
Hours earlier, during an appearance on Fox News media analysis show MediaBuzz, Griffin was asked by host Howard Kurtz about the attention she’s recently drawn for pushing back on some of her colleagues’ absurd Ukraine talking points.
“I cover the news. I’ve been part of the news division since those beginning days,” she asserted. “I’m here to fact-check facts, because I report on facts. And my job is to try and figure out the truth as best as I know it. I share those facts internally so that our network can be more accurate. That’s what I’ve always done.”
